71 
$95 



/ 



MY DISMISSAL 

FROM 

The Carnegie Institute of Technology 

(Causes and Effects) 

By GEORGE FREDERICK GUNDELFINGER, PH.D. 

Assistant Professor of Mathematics 

Author of " Ten Years at Yale " 



w 



PUBLISHED BY 
THE NEW FRATERNITY 

Literature &■ Music 
SEWICKLEY, PENNSYLVANIA 



©C1A689430 ^-^ 






/ Copyright, 1922. f 

^ George Frederick Gundelfinger. v 




GEOEGE FEEDEEICK GUNDELFINGEE 



MY DISMISSAL 



THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
(Causes and Effects) 

By GEORGE FREDERICK GUNDELFINGER, PH.D. 

Assistant Professor of Mathematics 

Author of " Ten Years at Yale " 



P A E T I 

Each fall, at the opening of the college year, President Hamerschlag 
addresses the faculty of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In every 
address of his that I have heard in this connection, he has invited members 
of the faculty who are dissatisfied with existing conditions to "open 
their hearts" to him personally. I happened to be one of the dissatisfied, 
and my deep dissatisfaction over the Poverty-Day Parade of April 26th, 
1922 aroused me to the point of sending the president a letter. The 
letter was not intended for publication, but since the president has dis- 
played it liberally to those who are more or less forced to side with him, 
I have decided to publish it for the benefit of those who are at liberty to 
side for themselves. 

The letter follows: 

April 26th, 1922. 
Dear Dr. Hamerschlag: — 

I regret that I missed seeing you last fall just before you left for 
Europe — all the more so because you 'phoned specially at the time to 
have me call at your office; but I do not regret having missed the scene 
of your return this morning which I read in the Pittshurgh Sun this 
evening. 

I am thoroughly in favor of allowing the students to relax com- 
pletely from studies now and then — in particular, to celebrate the arrival 
of spring (and of their returning president). There is nothing more 
wholesome in its effect than a May-Pole Dance for girls or similar games 
for boj's done on the campus in brilliant and fantastic costumes, and 
there should be no objection to the light attire which was customary 
with the Greeks, who knew the art of draping the human body in a manner 
which made their sports seem more natural and picturesque. However, 
while there is a probability of interpreting Mary Garden's exposures 
in Salome as inartistic, there is not the slightest possibility of any 



critic seeing anything artistic whatever about nude students strolling 
around our campus with their Tectums wrapped up in dirty newsipapers 
and clothesline or with their testicles in potato sacks. I should like to 
think that the scenes I witnessed in the hall of the Science Building this 
morning on my way to the General Faculty Meeting were not real visions 
but imaginary ones; and yet I would not care to possess a mind so 
depraved as to imagine the like. That yourself (and Mrs. Hamerschlag) 
should condescend to lead a parade of students attired like these is 
another matter I should prefer were mythical in spite of the fact that 
the Pittsburgh papers have flashed it before the eyes of the public in 
print and in picture. There is such a thing as helpful publicity, and 
there is such a thing as harmful notoriety. If, by to-day's exhibition, 
Tech expects to increase her enrollment (which, for next fall, is reported 
as annoyingly low), the increase cannot consist of other than undesirable 
students; indeed, I should not be surprised if parents, who had contem- 
plated sending their sons to us next fall, would decide to steer clear of 
us entirely after seeing the orgy staged so successfully this morning. 

When I first came to Tech as an instructor several years ago, several 
persons on the campus, knowing of the books I had written about Yale, 
called me aside and told me of the conditions at Carnegie, hoping to 
inveigle me into exposing them likewise. Although I believe thoroughly 
that merciless publicity is the only sure cure for the faults of any college 
and although I know conclusively that the merciless publicity I have 
given to Yale's faults has permanently removed many of them, at the 
same time I want to inform you in all sincerity that inwardly I neither 
have nor have had any intention of criticising Carnegie Tech publicly. 
I must admit, however, that such an attitude seems neglectful on my 
part, knowing what I know to exist and having the ability I have to 
portray it; but my attitude is justified by the fact that I have already 
done more than one man's share in the betterment of my own Alma 
Mater. And it behooves the alumni of Carnegie Tech to improve theirs! 
During my few years at Tech, I have, on my own initiative, tried to set 
high ideals before the school as a whole, but I shall make no further 
effort to do so since I have been requested to discontinue it. I shall, 
however, continue unconsciously if not consciously to place before the 
particular men who are under my personal instruction all the opportun- 
ities within my power. If each instructor were to do likewise, many of 
Tech's problems would be solved. Yet while this duty of the individual 
instructor is necessary for maintaining a high morale, it is not sufficient. 
The administrators, for example, may approve of a freakish idea of the 
student body which obliterates the good influence of individual members 
of the faculty. The Poverty-Day tradition ( ?) reflects the weakness of 
the administration which countenances it, although the faculty will be 
censured for their lack of censorship. The present administration needs 
public criticism — and it is my ardent hope that a Tech alumnus with 
vision and courage will soon step to the front to administer it; if Tech 
hasn 't produced one graduate with this capacity, she might just as well 
disintegrate — the sooner the better. 

Trusting Mrs. Hamerschlag and yourself have had a delightful trip, 
I am and shall remain 

Yours very faithfully, 

Geokge Frederick Gundelfinger. 



When 1 sealed the envelope to the above letter I forgot to mark it 
personal, but I addressed it to the president's home and not to his office, 
where it might have been read by his secretary. Despite the fact that 
the envelope was a printed commercial one, it was opened "inadvertent- 
ly" by the president's wife; and despite the fact that she was "shocked" 
by the second paragraph of the letter, she continued to read it to the very 
end and then took it upon herself to write an answer. 

I have no desire to publish in full Mrs. Hamerschlag's answer to a 
letter which was neither sent to nor intended for her — even though she 
had not marked the envelope personal; but I have enough good sense to 
understand that certain letters are not intended to be read by all persons 
even though the writers forget to indicate it. I do, however, want the 
public to know that Mrs. Hamerschlag accused me of having ' ' a per- 
verted state of mind." 

Since she was so inquisitive about reading the thoughts of a "per- 
verted" mind, I sent her a copy of my play, The Great Reliever, which 
had just then been published. Referring to those parts of the play which 
derict immorality in the lives of chorus girls, one reviewer of the book 
said: "In all justice to the author, we do not think that he wrote many 
of the scenes with a desire to cater to the degraded taste of many readers of 
to-day." He referred to the book as "free prose to the nth degree, 
to be read by clean minds only and calculated to do a great deal of good 
by teaching a moral that is fundamentally sound. ' ' Just what is meant 
by a clean mind is probably best explained by the following quotation 
from Emerson: "A few times in my life it has happened to me to meet 
persons of so good a nature and so good breeding that every topic was 
open and discussed without possibility of offense — persons who could not 
be shocked. ' ' I believe there are such beings as truly modest persons 
who require the "shock" known as education. Whether the minds of 
such persons are clean or unclean I am unable to say and would rather 
think of them as having no minds at all. Persons who do not come under 
this head modest are either clean -minded or vulgar -minded, neither of 
them strictly avoiding the topics of conversation which shock modest 
persons. But a vulgar-minded person is as uneducated as a modest one, 
for he delights in dwelling on these topics in a lewd way only, referring 
to certain matters and things by foul words which do not even exist as 
such in our dictionaries. For obvious reasons he cannot bear to hear 
thsse matters spoken of seriously or these things called by their proper 
names — in fact, in the company of clean-minded educated persons he 
becomes suddenly "modest." On the fly-leaf of my book The Great 
Believer, I inscribed a part of Mrs. Hamerschlag's letter in which she 
mentioned "the great desire toward righteousness which pervades all 
like God's sunshine." 

I do not know what part this, book The Great Believer has played 
in the action taken by President Hamerschlag, but I believe it has played 
a very important part — although he has been very silent concerning it. 
In telling the whole truth, however, I feel it is my duty to mention it here 
and perhaps refer to it again later. 

I also sent Mrs. Hamerschlag the following answer to her letter. 
Since she has allowed her husband to circulate it, she evidently does not 
regard it as a private communication and wUl not, therefore, object to 
its publication. 



April 29th, 1922. 
Dear Mrs. Hamerschlag: — 

I hope you observed how I underlined a part of the address on the 
envelope — a little thoughtfulness on my part which prevented this letter 
from having been opened "inadvertently." 

If I recall rightly, there was nothing in the first paragraph of my 
letter to President Hamerschlag referring to your return from Europe. 
There Avas, in fact, no mention made of your name untU after I had 
written the "shocking expressions," and then, I believe, I used your 
name parenthetically in connection with the president's when I expressed 
my regret at his having condescended to lead the Poverty-Day Parade. 
And at the very end of the letter, I also remember having included your 
name in hoping that the trip through Europe had been delightful. (It is 
unfortunate that said trip was marred by "the mangy cattle and the 
diseased people of Morocco," but perhaps if I had seen these also when 
I was abroad before the war, I would have been not less willing but 
more reluctant to criticise our "poverty-stricken" students at Tech. 
However, let us not forget that these cattle never had the opportunity 
for uplift offered by a college education.) All of which goes to show 
that it was through feminine curiosity rather than through a sense of 
obligation that, after opening the letter by mistake, you continued to read 
it even after receiving the shock which aroused you into answering it. 

I would have been much amused by your reference to my "perverted 
state of mind," were it not that tbe expression has become woefully 
trite with "moralists." Just as the sight of "the mangy cattle and 
diseased people of Morocco" seems to have left an impression on your 
mind, so has the sight of the vulgarly-clad ( ?) students left an impression 
on mine; and there is nothing more to indicate perversion in my descrip- 
tion of what I saw than there is in yours. While we often speak of the 
mind as a source, the things which "arise from the mind" are almost 
entirely reflections of what eyes or ears have seen or heard — not only our 
eyes and ears but those of our ancestors as well; so the modern psychol- 
ogist claims. It is downright ignorance and idiocy to say that a man has 
a perverse mind merely because he describes fearlessly, truthfully and 
minutely what he has observed in others in order to arouse the "blind"- 
and the "deaf" in the matter of reform. Perversion consists not in 
observing indiscriminately and in recording and reporting one's obser- 
vations, but in being unable to distinguish between good and evil and 
right and wrong. That you should be unable to differentiate between 
healthful nonsense and morbid vulgarity indicates your "perverted state 
of mind." 

However in regard to the Poverty-Day Parade, it should be said in 
your defense that while I saw it indoors at the Science Building, you 
saw it in "God's all-pervading sunshine" which is always more or less 
blinding. To use your own words: "7 saw nothing, nothing so shock- 
ing, etc." The objection to God's sunshine is that we are inclined to 
bask in it lazily and contentedly, half closing our eyes not only to the 
evils which surround us but also to the nonchalance which its warmth 
engenders in ourselves. This lassitude possesses us until we are rudely 
awakened by the electric shocks from God's lightning, without which 
the atmosphere, due to excessive sunshine, would grow unbearably stale 
and even putrid. It is true that God's sunshine is constructive in that it 



enables things to grow and keep on growing irrespective of their worth; 
but it is God's destructive tempest which washes and tears away much 
that has grown decayed, albeit good things too are sometimes unexplain- 
ably carried away in His wrath. It is so with Constructive Criticism: it 
enables one to go on building and building often on rotten foundations 
until Destructive Criticism abolishes the rottenness and makes way for 
a structure which not only looks big and strong but actually is. 

Here is another of your absurd insinuations: "That you could see 
nothing but evil (in this Poverty Day) is sad: for a man with under- 
standing of youth and the joy of nonsense gone is poverty-stricken 
indeed, and no game of make-believe could conceal it." I too might 
say: That you could see nothing in my letter but my "shocking ex- 
pressions" is sad indeed, and yet these seemed to absorb your mind to 
the point where it completely ignored my statements that I thoroughly 
approve of temporary relaxation from studies and that there is nothing 
more wholesome than May Dances and Greek Games on the campus. 
You do not know to whom you are writing, and you evidently shun any 
effort on my part to reveal my true nature. If you knew me or if you 
even cared to know me, you would never have put such ridiculous ac- 
cusations on paper. I want you to know that I fully enjoy being among 
the boys at Carnegie Tech, and I know full well the meaning of their 
twinkling eyes and their glowing cheeks; if these were repulsive to me 
(as you seem to infer), I would give up my position as professor and 
apply for a job as janitor in some Home For The Aged. The plain truth 
is that there is no one who feels more like participating in the playful 
pranks of youth than myself — if I dared. The quality in a teacher that 
makes a student like him is the teacher's capacity and hidden desire for 
youthful effervescence; but the quality which makes the student respect 
him is that selfsame restraint which every model instructor should 
inculcate in every youth under his instruction — the restraint without 
which effervescence is enervating, repulsive and degrading. An occasional 
suggestion of the softening of this restraint on the part of an instructor 
may serve to assure the student that effervescence is not wanting; but 
when it breaks down entirely and permanently, then respect degenerates 
into a cheap confederacy between teacher and taught and the good 
influence becomes not only nil but perverse. I advise you to question 
any student under my instruction in the institution over which your 
husband presides concerning my "poverty-stricken" condition as to 
either my own youthfulness or my appreciation and understanding of it 
in others; and I wager that were you to likewise question the instructors 
in the Department of Mathematics with whom I come in daily contact 
they would unanimously vote me the biggest exponent of nonsense among 
their acquaintances. Indeed the fact that I have enjoyed your letter 
ought to be a sufficient proof of my love of nonsense. To read your 
letter one would think I were a shrivelled-up old crank. You ought to 
be informed that there are two distinct types of the kind of man you 
would make me out to be: the man who has never been endowed with 
the spirit of youth and the man who has dissipated it. And you ought 
also to be informed from other than an egoistic source that I am neither. 
It is the conservation of the spirit of youth that keeps one alive and young. 
You write that the ' ' indiscretions ' ' you observed on Poverty Day were ' ' due 
to the thoughtlessness of youth rather than conscious thought. ' ' Thought- 



lessness goes hand in hand with dissipation; conscious thought with con- 
servation. Your letter proves convincingly that your attitude is that of a 
modern flapper, and "no game of make-believe (in God's all-pervading 
sunshine) can conceal it." 

This correspondence between us is an accident ; it was not premeditated 
on my part. I wrote a letter to President Hamerschlag, and I mentioned 
your name therein. Although it was not my intention that you should read 
this letter, nevertheless T had hoped that you would be informed of its 
message and that you would use your influence toward betterment. However, 
I had no objection to your reading my letter; I have no objection to any 
one reading any of my letters. But if I had purposely intended that you 
should read my letter rather than be told of its message indirectly, then I 
Avould undoubtedly have been a little less free in the use of "shocking ex- 
pressions. ' ' But Fate has had her way — and, I believe, a good Avay. She 
has succeeded in shocking you all the way into answering your husband's 
letter, and by doing so, she has revealed to me your own attitude and the 
fact that the married administrators of our colleges are not solely to blame 
for the all-pervading thoughtlessness either of our students or of themselves. 

Would that you had written your letter to a Tech graduate instead of to 
a man who is deeply interested in Tech 's moral welfare ; it might have 
accomplished in hiin a highly desirable, metamorphosis. 
Yours very faithfully, 

George Frederick Gundelfinger. 

I heard nothing more concerning my letter to President Hamerschlag 
until Tuesday morning. May 9th, 1922, when I was called before Director 
Day of the Faculty of General Studies and Professor Keller of the Depart- 
ment of Mathematics. I refused to discuss the letter with them because I 
considered it a personal matter between myself and the president. He, 
however, refused to discuss the letter with me alone, and so I met him with 
Director Day and Professor Keller in his office on Wednesday afternoon, 
May 10th, 1922. 

Before this meeting got under way, I stated clearly that I was attending 
it only with extreme reluctance and did not feel it was necessary for me to 
attend at all. President Hamerschlag, however, insisted that my letter Avas 
of an "official" nature and that it must therefore be considered in the 
presence of his f elloAV-administrators. He held up the envelope to show that 
it did not contain the word personal, although he ignored the facts that it 
was sent to his home and that I addressed him not by his official title but 
very informally as "Dear Dr. Hamersrhlag. " And I shall leave it to the 
reader's judgment to decide if the contents and tone of the letter do not 
indicate (far more clearly than if the word personal had appeared on the 
euA'elope) a confidential rather than an official communication. It is queer 
that President Hamerschlag regards as unofficial any communication to the 
Board of Trustees which has not passed first through his hands, but regards 
as ' ' official ' ' a letter to himself which was not even sent to his office or 
through the head of my department or faculty — a letter which not a soul 
aside from myself knew I had written — a letter in which I had, at his 
request, confidentially ' ' opened my heart ' ' and Avhich he then used officially 
as an indication that 1 should be dismissed. 

But President Hamerschlag did not dismiss me merely for writing the 
letter, but because the views expressed therein were ' ' false. ' ' His marvelous 



method for proving them "false" Avas to compare them with the views of 
Director Day and Professor Keller, who, at this meeting, both voiced 
favorable impressions as to not only the Poverty-Day Parade but also 
conditions in general. (For other matters aside from the letter were dis- 
cussed at this meeting in order to arrive at more ' ' conclusive ' ' reasons for 
a dismissal.) The president accepted their views as true. Hence the ex- 
tremely logical conclusion that my views were necessarily false, and further- 
more that my insistence on maintaining them denoted an "irrational 
mind." (Compare with Mrs. Hamerschlag 's "perverted state of mind.") 
I was, therefore, ' ' unfit to teach ' ' in the classroom, and the president could 
not see how he could recommend me to a position on the faculty next year. 
I told him that I refused to resign and that he must choose between retain- 
ing me and dropping all further reference to my letter as an official com- 
munication or dismissing me and having the matter given merciless publicity. 
I then left the meeting to await the decision. 

The next day I wrote him the following letter: 

May 11th, 1922. 
Dear President Hamerschlag: — 

I have a natural gift (rather than one acquired through the study of 
Psychology) of getting inside of a person's mind and making a close study 
of his or her character. I have recorded several of these studies in my 
plays The Ice Lens and The Great Believer. As a result of our meeting 
yesterday, I have decided to make a close study of you and prove (to my 
mind) that you should be ousted as President of the Carnegie Institute ol 
Technology. This procedure on my part will no doubt furnish you with 
further proof (to your mind) that my mind is irrational. That however 
remains to be seen by the unbiased judges who will read my study. What 
you consider mental irrationality may turn out to be mental superiority 
and a sense of insight above — far above — the average. Let me add, how- 
ever, that my study shall not be made public until I have been notified 
officially of my dismissal. If you decide to drop all further discussion of 
my Poverty-Day letter as an official gommunication to the administration, 
I shall destroy my written investigation of your character. 

This is not a threat or an attempt to prevent my dismissal. In any 
case I am doing the whole thing with extreme reluctance. If you feel in 
your heart that you are doing the right thing, by all means go ahead and 
see it through — and then I shall help the public to see through it. 
Yours very faithfully, 

George Feederick Gtjndelfinger. 

The above letter was very distinctly marked personal and was sent by 
registered mail to the president's office. With it I sent a copy of the new 
edition of my play The Ice Lens. 

On Friday morning. May 12th, 1922, Director Day informed me that 
the president had made a final decision to dismiss me. I immediately went 
to the president 's office to have the verdict verified. I was told the president 
could not see me, but that I might 'phone to him, which I did. Over the 
'phone he told me he could not see me until the following week, but he 
verified his decision. I then saw both Director Day and Professor Keller 
and asked if they were going to stand by the president. They answered in 
the affirmative, although Director Day was far more firm than Professor 



10 

Keller — or shall I say far less weak. 

I did not, of course, care to publisli the decision of these three men 
without first ascertaining if it was also the decision of the institute as a 
whole. So I proceeded to write "A Letter to the Trustees, the Faculty and 
the Students of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, ' ' had over a thousand 
copies printed and placed in sealed envelopes marked personal. The follow- 
ing notice was printed at the head of the letter : 

Important — This printed letter has been sent to you in a sealed en- 
velope marked personal. Please regard it as confidential — confidential as far 
as the Carnegie Institute of Technology is concerned. The author desires 
that you pass your copy along to any officer or student of the school who 
has happened not to receive one; or, if you prefer, he will send you ad- 
ditional copies for that purpose. No copies have been or will be sent by 
him to persons not connected with the institution, and he requests that you 
likewise comply with this restriction. He has no desire whatever to have 
the letter read by the General Public — unless the institute as a whole (as 
indicated by its inaction) sanctions the step taken by the president, in which 
case the whole matter will be given merciless publicity, not because the 
author wishes to do the institute any particular harm or because he is 
seeking for personal notoriety but because he believes whole-heartedly that 
an act of injustice should be exposed and aired to the same degree that it 
is supported. 

In this Letter I told the story T have so far related. I did not, however, 
publish the letters ; in fact I did not even mention the registered letter or the 
letter to Mrs. Hamerschlag, although I made it clear that she had opened 
and read the original one. I also took the opportunity to publish not the 
impressions of the Carnegie Institute of Technology which Director Day and 
Professor Keller gave at the meeting in the president's office, but the views 
they had earlier expressed to me, and to state in addition some of the 
t-Laracteristics of these men which I (and many others) could not possibly 
refrain from observing. I printed these not because I craved revenge or 
entertained any "malicious" consequences, but solely to prove that they 
were both unfit men to judge as to whether or not I was "unfit to teach." 
The fact that I am working under flabby -minded "superiors" is of no 
concern to me as long as I am permitted to continue my good work un- 
molested ; but when such ' ' superiors ' ' attempt to put an end to my good 
work by ousting me on the claim that my mind is "irrational" just because 
my views do not conform with their loose philosophies, then I consider it 
both my right and my duty to expose them. The progress of education 
demands it. 

At the end of my printed Letter I stated that I did not consider their 
decision as final but "as dirty a piece of intrigue as has ever been per- 
petrated in our halls of learning." I openly called President Hamerschlag 
a contemptible hypocrite which he undeniably is and probably ever shall be, 
and I stated that ' ' if, by the time Commencement comes in June, I find that 
the Students (Science School) and the General Faculty have not quietly 
expressed disapproval of their president's action, and if I have not heard 
officially from the Board of Trustees that I am to continue my duties next 
fall, I shall leave the school with an impression as unavoidably harmful as 
it is truthful, and which neither time nor tide will efface from the mind of 
the public at large." 



11 

These printed letters were delivered on Saturday afternoon, May 27th, 
1922 — the last day of "Campus Week" — to all the trustees, all the officers 
and faculty of the institution, but to only such students as were or had been 
at some time or other under my instruction. 

Although I have heard since, that a certain member of the faculty had 
tried to incite the students to run me off the campus for circulating such 
a letter, I did not, on the following Monday morning, notice any hostile 
attitude whatever on the part of the undergraduates. Indeed some students, 
one of whom I had never instructed or even known, came to my recitation 
room and asked me for additional copies of the Letter for further distribu- 
tion, which indicated to me that other students aside from my own were 
interested and which led me to mail a second lot of letters to the dormi- 
tories. While it is very likely that certain individual students were highly 
irritated by what T had done, I must confess that, generally speaking, I was 
greeted by kind smiles everywhere and spoken to amicably by students who 
had not known me before. The attitude of the boys in my own classes — 
especially those who had participated in the Poverty-Day Parade — was so 
wondrously sympathetic that I shall never be able to forget it. I had never 
before been cheered by a class at Tech, but after I dismissed my last class 
at the end of the year, they cheered me with so much abandon and with such 
a ring of sincerity that the walls of the room as Avell as those of my heart 
seemed to tremble with emotion. 

The attitude of the faculty was not, of course, so pronounced or so open. 
One would hardly expect it to be. There were indeed some members of the 
faculty whose support T would not care to have — whose support would be 
only a shadow on my reputation — but there were a large number who are 
too dependent to express their true feeling, since the expression might result 
in serious consequences both to themselves and their families. A meeting of 
the General Faculty was called on Tuesday, June 6th, 1922, to pass certain 
resolutions. The meeting was attended by Secretary Baker who was sent 
by President Hamerschlag to count and recognize all the nays. He must 
have reminded one of the cowboy-minister who converted his whole con- 
gregation by aiming a horse-pistol from the pulpit and saying: "Now all 
those \^ho do not believe in God, please rise." I am told that a secret 
ballot would have brought about a very different result. 

The Eesolutions follow: 

"Whereas, in a letter to the Trustees, Faculty and Students of the 
Carnegie Institute of Technology, sent out under the date of May 27th, 
1922, by Assistant Professor Gundelfinger, the writer severely attacks the 
motives and character of the Head of his Department and the Director of 
his Division, the General Faculty herewith adopts the following resolutions: 

" 1 ) We condemn the intemperate personal attacks in the letter a? 
unjustifiable, unfair in method and vindictive in spirit. 

"2) By his deliberate effort through direct charges and covert in- 
sinuations to discredit the character and standing of those attacked. Pro- 
fessor Gundelfinger has forfeited the confidence and good will that might 
have been given him by his colleagues in any sincere and well-ordered effort 
to uphold a high standard of conduct in the student body. ' ' 

"Unjustifiable, unfair in method and vindictive in spirit" are ex- 
pressions which fully and exactly describe the president's action in dis- 



12 

missing me. And had he not "by his deliberate effort through direct 
charges and covert insinuations" tried "to discredit my character and 
standing?" To say that I am "unfit to teach" is as direct a charge and 
to say that my mind is "irrational" is as covert an insinuation as any T 
have made against my ' ' superiors. " It is true that the president, unlike 
myself, did not make his charges before the whole school, but his "diplom- 
acy ' ' was nothing more than timidity and doubt in his accusations. Further- 
more the school would eventually have wanted to know why I had left and, 
if I wei'e to seek a position elsewhere, I myself would demand my old 
employer to inform my new one as to just why I was making the change. 
President Hamerschlag, no doubt, would have been satisfied to inform the 
school and the American public that I had resigned; fortunately my mind, 
in this respect at least, is not so irrational as his own. Both Director Day 
and Professor Keller (as well as President Hamerschlag) know in their 
hearts that his charges against me are putrid lies far more irrational than 
anything I have ever said; and yet they have sanctioned these charges and 
insinuations by agreeing with him. Then why should I, in my own defense, 
not be permitted to attack them truthfully and openly in return? It is to 
be regretted that the General Faculty, through these Resolutions, condemned 
my procedure. Would it not have shown a more becoming color by voicing 
its desire to have secret falsehood downed by open truth at all times, ir- 
respective of the rank of the officers on either side? 

Before judging the General Faculty, however, it is only fair that I 
should inform the reader just how these Eesolutions were drawn up. They 
did not originate with the General Faculty at all. They grew out of a 
Recommendation submitted by the Heads (Professor Keller being one of 
them) of Director Day's Faculty in the College of General Studies — sub- 
mitted to the Executive Committee which censors and modifies all resolu- 
tions before they are brought before the General Faculty. I happened to 
be a member of this Executive Committee and therefore had the reserved 
honor of hearing this original Recommendation. It was evidently intended 
for publication, but since it was not even submitted to the General Faculty, 
it will now probably be considered "viciously low" to publish it here. But 
since it has been the general policy from the very beginning of this affair 
to consider even personal letters as official and to circulate them freely, I 
shall, for the sake of conformity, print this remarkable Recommendation. 
However, since it is the product of several minds, I shall not be offending 
any one particular person by publishing it, although among its floral phrases, 
I (and perhaps others) can detect the distinctly individual odors of certain 
contributors. Furthermore since it has emanated from the best and most 
"rational" minds of the institute, its publication will be a great credit to 
the school and serve as a corrective for my own ' ' irrational ' ' opinions. 

The Recommendation follows : 

June 5th, 1922. 

This meeting has been called at the request of the Heads of the Depart- 
ments of General Studies not to discuss the action of the President or meet 
the wishes of Professor Gundelfinger, but to determine the manner of 
censuring Professor Gundelfinger for his iinwar ranted and unqualified 
attacks against Director Day and our Senior member. Professor Keller. 

The Department Heads of the Division of General Studies feel that the 
nature of the attack against Director Day and Professor Keller is malicious 



13 

and entirely unjustifiable. It is luiAvorthy of a gentleman, so viciously low 
that, in the estimation of the Department Heads, Professor Gundelfinger 
has forfeited the right to associate with ns as a member of the Faculty of 
the Carnegie Institute of Technology. 

We, the Heads of the Departments, therefore move that our findings be 
endorsed by the General Faculty, as reprsenting the views of the body 
at larre. 

Tt will be observed that this hymn of hate underwent (Avithout my aid) 
no small amount of censoring and modifiegtion bv the Executive Committee 
who were needed to guide the demented "Heads" of the Departments of 
General Study and to rescue these perfect gentlemen from the unconscious 
animal depths into which one would hardly expect psychologists of inter- 
national fame (at least) to descend. I am glad that in my attacks both 
en Director Day and on Professor Keller I was calm and cool enough to 
make a pun. Indeed, in the Eecommendation of the Heads to have my 
right as a member of the faculty to ' ' associate ' ' with them forfeited, I 
should like to say that it was a right that I never exercised or even cared to 
exercise and that the forfeiture of it might now (owing to the symptoms of 
hydrophobia resulting from the biting attacks of a viciously low gentleman) 
be advantageously endorsed by the General Faculty for other members 
as well. 

In addition to this Eecommendation, the Executive Committee was also 
asked to read the letters which I had sent to the president. But the com- 
mittee, quite independent of any plea on my part, was willing to accept my 
printed explanation that the letters '"ere personal and to ignore the presi- 
dent 's insistence on their ' ' official ' ' nature and so voted to send the letters 
back to Secretary Baker unread. The letters included my original letter to 
the president's home, my answer to Mrs. Hamerschlag (which had also 
become ''official") and my second registered, plainly-marked-personal letter 
to the president 's office. From the fact that the president was circulating 
the latter letter, I learned that even if I had marked my original letter 
personal and even if I had registered it in an attempt to prevent his wife 
from opening it, he would still have considered it ' ' official. ' ' In other words 
I had discovered that the president 's mind is too loose to consider anything 
confidentially. He seems to have neither the ability nor the courage to de- 
cide righteously matters of a personal nature; so he camouflages them as 
"olricial communications" to avoid the sole responsibility of handing down 
a decision which he personally favors but which he hypnotizes his felloAv- 
administrators into making for him. 

From the original Eecommendation of the Heads, it is obvious that 
they undertook to work on the sympathies of the General Faculty for Direc- 
tor Day and Professor Keller, both of whom, owing to their strong tendencies 
to be sociable, are rather popular. The charges I made against these men 
in my printed Letter no doubt led their friends to vote for the Eesolutions 
submitted, although they likely would not have voted (had these charges not 
been made) for a resolution disapproving of the president's action in 
dismissing me. I was told I had an excellent case against the president and. 
would have won it easily if I had not involved Director Day and Professor 
Keller; but I saw the matter impartially and felt that all who sided with 
the president, either voluntarily or otherwise, were equally to blame. 
Furthermore, without a doubt, the president or those Heads who are his 



14 

particular friends would have protested against a general faculty meeting 
to pass a resolution belittling himself and favoring me, and yet he must 
have craved some sort of a resolution to indicate, however indirectly, that 
the faculty favored his action. One begins to understand clearly Avhy (in 
addition to being too timid to do so) he refused to discuss my personal 
letter with me alone. Director Day and Professor Keller both revealed 
additional weakness of character by allowing themselves to be ensnared in 
a purely personal affair. That President Hamerschlag had a hand in the 
Eecommendation of the Heads I surmised and actually discovered later, 
though unintentionally. Indeed, the words, ' ' not to discuss the action of the 
President or to meet the wishes of Professor Gundelfinger " show clearly 
both the obvious intention to suppress the kind of resolution I wanted and 
the stupid effort to disguise their more exact positive significance: "to 
discuss the action of Professor Gundelfinger and meet the wishes of the 
President." But the Executive Committee saw to it that the president's 
desire (as worded in the Eecommendaion) "to have Professor Gundelfinger 
forfeit the right to associate wi'th us as a member of the Faculty of the 
Carnegie Institute of Technology" was not voraciously gratified by the 
Faculty Eesolutions. But he has, without a doubt, sent the Eesolutions of 
the General Faculty to the trustees to prove to them indirectly that the 
General Faculty approved of his original grounds for dismissing me (which 
is a diabolical lie) ; and this explains why I did not receive a letter of re- 
instatement from the Board. It appears then that my printed Letter, 
because I used it to tell the whole truth instead of only a part of it, frus- 
trated the very purpose it was intended to accomplish. 

For the benefit of the reader, I shall republish here three paragraphs 
from my printed Letter to acquaint him with my charges : 

"At that meeting, both Director Day and Professor Keller said that 
while they believed criticism to be helpful, they objected entirely to my 
manner of criticising. I have no desire to conceal my belief that a lot of the 
so called criticism is little more than a kiss on the spot that hurts. Such 
criticism will never cure the more serious sores, and the critic who so at- 
tempts to cure them is very likely to contract the sores on his own lips. 
These sores always require a stinging ointment and sometimes a keen knife 
to eat or cut away the poison. But I speak with ardent honesty when I say 
that it has never been my intention either to administer ointment or to apply 
the knife publicly to the Carnegie Institute of Technology as I have done to 
my Alma Mater with such beneficial results; but in what I hoped would be 
a confidential letter to President Hamerschlag, I did express my wish that 
a graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology would step forward to 
render the same service to his. While I have no desire whatever to repeat 
here the words in which I expressed my opinions confidentially, I considered 
it courteous (not courageous) to convey my opinions to the president on 
paper as forcefully as some of my more ' ' loyal ' ' colleagues have expressed 
theirs to me behind his back 

' ' In regard to Director Day 's views, I should like to say that they were 
very consistent with the views he expressed to me when I first came to know 
him and which I believe are sincere. His attitude is the easy-going one 
that is typical of the British academic mind. He upholds that colleges 
should turn out good mixers, and he believes (with Oscar Wilde) that men 
must have vices before they can love one another. He evidently loves 



15 

President Hamerschlag (for I have never heard him say one word against 
him), and he doubtless goes to his office frequently to kiss the sores of the 
institute. And, of course, if the directors love the president and if the 
faculty love the students then conditions are all that one could expect. 
Hence Director Day has ' ' that enthusiasm that should lie in us all ' ' — as he 
puts it (although one does not hear the italics). He admits however that 
a house divided against itself cannot stand, although he prefers to retain 
that party which favors a faulty foundation. But which man is of more 
benefit to a community? He who possesses a mind which is dissatisfied with 
existing vices or he who is possessed with a lying enthusiasm? At the 
opening of the present college year. Director Day advised his faculty en 
masse that if any of them were dissatisfied, it would be better for all con- 
cerned were they to quit the institution. Might one not also say that if a 
man 's ideas do not conform Avith American Ideals, it were better for him to 
quit our country? Such English "celebrities" as Chesterton, W. L. George 
and Margot Asquith do not remain with us very long, and their drivel soon 
evaporates; but when outsiders inclined to make loose statements are re- 
tained as ' ' directors ' ' in our universities for the entire college year, the 
morale of American student life will inevitably waver. Our national educa- 
tion has happily been freed of that intense militaristic discipline of the 
German system; but are we going to allow English propaganda to swing 
the pendulum too far in the opposite dii'ection beyond the stable and healthy 
intermediate position v/hich is characteristic of genuine Americanism? 

"Professor Keller's attitude in President Hamerschlag 's office was, 
on the other hand, entirely inconsistent Avith the views which he constantly 
feeds to the men on his staff. Prom the nature of the remarks which he 
reiterates continually at our departmental faculty meetings, one invariably 
gets the impression that almost everybody and almost everything connected 
with the Carnegie Institute of Technology are "rotten." Unlike Director 
Day, Professor Keller has no great love for President Hamerschlag and no 
kisses for the school. He has lost all his former concern in Tech's actual 
progress and makes no individual effort to arrive at plans for her betterment 
— -although, be it said to his credit, he takes all the good suggestions from 
the teachers under liim and (to hear him tell it) fights for them in the 
Senate as enthusiastically as he plays pool at the Faculty Club. His only 
remaining sources of interest at the institute appear to be Tech 's social life 
on the campus and the salary he draws for living it. ' ' 

I do not regret having published a single word which I have had re- 
printed above. On the contrary I am glad I had the opportunity to enlight- 
en those who were blind to Director Day's and Professor Keller's short- 
comings and to speak for those who were too timid or too dependent to 
'speak the same truth themselves. And I am glad that I now have the 
further opportunity to add statements to verify what I have said and to 
augment it with fresh "direct charges' and covert insinuations," not only 
against Director Day and Professor Keller but against other authors of the 
Eecommendation as well. 

It may surprise certain members of the faculty to hear that at the 
meeting in the president's office Director Day admitted that he believed 
' ' men must have vices before they can love one another ' ' and reinforced 
his admission by claiming that he ' ' disliked virtuous men, ' ' to all of which 
the president agreed — if silence denotes consent. After all, then, have I 



16 

attacked Director Day or have I merely given publicity to Director Day's 
own charge against himself "to discredit his character and standing.'' 
The first time I ever spoke to Director Day in his ovrn office, several years 
ago, he laid bare his tendencies by confessing (without my forcing or even 
desiring the knowledge) that he Avas "sensual." His opera, Roses of 
Mercatel, inspired by his military experiences in France and presented by 
the School of Design of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, is (if Pro- 
fessor Vick O 'Brien 's score be considered a faithful medium of interpreta- 
tion) little more than a continual state of erection with orgasm after 
orgasm, all of which may be essential to art but which, as mere passion, 
has no place in education — not until it has undergone sublimation. Again, 
Director Day's favorite novel, Felle, the Conqueror, about Avhich he likes to 
lecture, abounds in suggestive discourse and reeks Avith sexual dissipation, 
the hero being an ardent extoller of mere illiterate flesh and the father of 
at least two illegitimate children. 

The fact that Director Day is also Commander of the British War 
Veterans in the Pittsburgh District ought to be conclusive proof of my 
charge that lie is an English Propagandist whose interest in American 
education is not altogether for America's benefit. 

At the opening of the Fall term, I asked Director Day's permission to 
circulate my anti-tobacco pamphlet among the freshmen. He refused to 
grant it, returning a copy in which he had underlined, among others, the 
following statements as objectionable: 

"The minister who uses tobacco or liquor cannot Avrite or deliver a 
Godly sermon. God refuses to speak — he cannot speak clearly through such 
a medium. The sermon may be a perfect counterfeit, but the minister who 
uses counterfeit sermons should be placed on the same level with him who 
manufactures counterfeit money. (Director Day is descended from ministers 
— who smoked.) 

' ' There is no other place Avhere vulgar stories are related with smoother 
eloquence and heard with more absorbing interest than in a room filled with 
students and tobacco smoke. ' ' 

' ' Immediately after classes, the faculty seek the seclusion of their private 
offices, close the doors on the "No Smoking" placards posted so hypo- 
critically in the vestibules, and are soon throAving off volumes like the 
dragon in Siegfried." (Director Day's desk is always covered AAdth tobacco 
cans, and there is a placard prohibiting smoking in the corridor leading 
to his room.) 

"It is absurd to even think of reforming our undergraduates until we 
reform each and every man Avho instructs them. ' ' 

' ' I should very much dislike to send a young and impressionable son 
for instruction in any subject to any teacher AA-ho uses cigarettes." (This 
statement is quoted from a AA-ell-known specialist on the drug habit. Director* 
Day smokes cigarettes.) 

' ' There is nothing more inconsistent than a professor working over his 
researches at the same time that he is devouring a cigarette ; it must be a 
queer sort of enlightenment that springs from a brain steeped in nicotine. ' ' 

' ' What a blessing are single beds ! ' ' 

' ' Liquor uninstinctively inflames a man to fight — to fight for any cause 
whatever or, as is more often the case, for no cause at all. The United 
States hoAvever did not care to have its fighters blindly and artificially 
inflamed by spirits but by The Spirit of World-Freedom. ' ' (Director Day 



17 

considered this as a fling at the use of rum in the English army and 
undertook to defend the latter.) 

"AVe must appeal primarily not to the unlettered I. W. W. who spit 
on their dirty hands, but to the cultured gentlemen who expectorate into 
nickel-plated cuspidors.'' (Director Day informed me that filthy cuspidors 
are solely an American institution unheard of in England. I suppose all 
Englishmen spit backAvards.) 

By calling my attention to these particular "objectionable" statements, 
Director Day revealed various elements in his make-up. 

But it is known by many that in spite of his splendid i)hysique, he has 
no "backbone," makes promises that he does not live up to, is shallow and 
^isionless along certain lines of common thought, takes no heed of the 
opportunities to utili2e the forces for improvement which constantly mani- 
fest themselves in certain members of his faculty but, instead, works for 
the advancement of personal friends whose ' ' ideals ' ' are no higher than 
his OAvn. When he addresses liis staff, he reminds one of an overgrown boy 
w'ho is never so farcical as when he attempts to be forceful. Tie is absolutely 
uninspiring — in fact, entirely discouraging. The nationality of his mind 
is extremely evident.; as to its rationality — well, he is, without a doubt, 
totally unfit for an educator in the American sense of the word. 

In addition to the letters I have mentioned, there was an earlier letter 
of mine Ayhieli produced a staunch ally for President Hamerschlag. About 
a year before. Professor Esquerre, Head of the Department of Health, a 
member of Director Day's faculty and an inseparable friend of Professor 
Keller, was lamenting to his colleagues "the rotten human element" in 
certain instructors among whom I was included. I do not know how 
Professor Esquerre arrived at his opinion, at least as far as myself was 
concerned, unless it was from the fact that I had never smoked in his 
company; for he manages a pipe as naturally and as contentedly as a baby 
sucks a nipple, and he believes that cigarettes are harmless, although he is 
as stunted and as unwholesome a specimen of humanity as haunts the Tech 
campus. On hearing indirectly the criticism he was broadcasting, I wrote 
a few lines asking him to come to me personally about my ' ' faults ' ' instead 
of gossiping them about "like a timid old maid" — a phrase which insulted 
him to the degree that only a Frenchman can attain. He likewise considered 
my letter an ' ' official ' ' document, ran with it immediately to Professor 
Keller and probably to Director Day and to President Hamerschlag also. 
His lack of control over his emotions, in the half dozen or so sessions I had 
with him at the time, revealed clearly the futility of any lasting peace terms 
with France. Only once have I seen a face twitch similarly with revenge, 
and that was when I saw "Goliath" in the screen-version of ToVahle David. 
(I do not mean to be sarcastic here by referring to Goliath, but I must 
candidly admit that I would never have laelieved the desire for self -gratifica- 
tion could be so vicious in an educated man.) His miserable French accent 
on English words, together with his extreme excitability, delayed my under- 
standing of what he really wanted to calm him. I believe nothing but a 
duel could have satisfied him completely, but he Avas temporarily soothed by 
an apology in the form of another letter — a letter wliieli I would have 
considered by far a bigger insult than the first one. His wrath never 
subsided completely and was amply rekindled by my printed circular. It was 
Professor Esquerre who tried to incite the students to run me out of the 
school, and he also was, no doubt, Vauteur ■premier of the distinguished 



18 

(and extinguished) Eeeommendation to the Executive Committee. 

Another staunch ally to the president and also a Head of 
Professor Day's Faculty was Professor Bingham of the Department 
of Psychology. During my first year at the institute I had declined 
an invitation to spend an evening with the psychologists at cards 
and dancing. My declination may have become an "official" matter, 
but I believe Professor Bingham's refusal to speak to me on the 
morning of the day on which the Eesolutions were passed was due 
far more to my attitude toward academic research — especially, in the 
realms of Psychology, where most of the investigations are of an 
infantile if not of an imbecile nature. The psychological tests which 
are being imposed on the students at our colleges and universities 
today are nowhere considered more of a joke than they are at the 
Carnegie Institute of Technology. They psychologists there have 
absorbed the German idea of trying to run the university if not the 
universe; they have poked their noses into every conceivable crevice 
with the hope of bringing out that god Efficiency. And they have 
even gone beyond the campus: one of them, Professor Bingham him- 
self I believe, recently interfered with a policeman's manner of arrest- 
ing a man in public, with the reeult that the psychologist, although 
unknown as such to the officer, was hauled to the police-station along 
with the other disturber of the peace. May the day soon come when 
all meddling psychologists are given a similar ride. It will be a happy 
day for educational America, second only in significance to the Fourth 
of July. Professor Bingham was the avenue through which President 
Hamerschlag reached the Heads of General Studies to dictate the 
Eeeommendation. 

While all the Heads of Director Day's Faculty were more or less 
rabid over my Letter, the attitudes of the members of the Executive 
Committee were not unanimously liberal. Professor Eiggs of the Depart- 
ment of Mechanical Engineering was particularly anxious that my "un- 
warranted" attack on Professor Keller be condemned. Professor Eiggs 
and myself had always been on friendly terms, and it was at his suggestion 
that I became a member of the Freshman Scholarship Committee in the 
Science School, on which I served with him for several years. I should 
like to say in regard to Professor Eiggs (and I know Professor Keller will 
agree with me) that he does more Avork than any other man on the Faculty 
of the Carnegie Institiite of Technology and earns far more than double 
his salary. But Professor Eiggs does not seem to agree with me when I 
place Professor Keller at the other extreme, — and yet every instructor who 
has recently served on Professor Keller's staff will, I know, admit this. It 
is almost impossible to conceive how the Head of a Department can 
degenerate into such a mere cipher, and yet this is a true measure of 
Professor Keller's value to the institute, despite the fact that he may have 
been deeply interested in its progress at the start. His recent misfortune 
and illness are not explanations for his apathy (as some of his friends 
Avould have us see it), for it was one of his out-standing characteristics six 
years ago when I met him in his office with a meerschaum pacifier in his 
mouth, reading a story of adventure written for boys at the age of four- 
teen. To condemn my attack on the mere ground that he is a "senior 
member" is, to my mind, false courtesy. I respect senority as long as the 
senior knows his place. When he reaches his "second childhood," we 



19 

should not be so sentimental and considerate as to allow him to remain in 
a position of responsibility with the result that the entire department is 
weakened and disordered through dissatisfaction and ridicule. Professor 
Eigg's soft heart is his only sin. I have observed its bad influence time 
and again in his attitude as Chairman of the Scholarship Committee. He 
allows the freshmen to win him by tears and by long recitals of invented 
woes, and he then declares it is either too early or too late in the academic 
year to drop them, thereby gaining the favor of President Hamerschlag by 
maintaining a big enrollment irrespective of its quality. Professor Riggs 
was the chief framer of the Eesolutions passed by the General Faculty. 
That he, in framing these Resolutions, should become so ' ' intemperate ' ' as 
"to discredit my character and standing" through the "direct charge" 
that my ' ' effort to uphold a high standard of conduct in the student body ' ' 
is "not sincere" and the "covert insinuation" that it is "not well- 
ordered ' ' — that he should become so ' ' intemperate, ' ' I say, is very hopeful ; 
and the freshmen had better take heed. 

Both Director Day and Professor Keller were badly broken up over 
my printed Letter, and, doubtless, one of the main purposes of the General 
Faculty (but not of the president) in having the Resolutions passed was 
to console these two men. Another evident purpose was to discourage me 
in my work of reform. I believe the accomplishment of the first of these 
purposes has not been successful, and I know the second has failed utterly. 
Genuine sympathy need never be forced to express itself. I did not obtain 
consolation from my students by threatening to "flunk" each one who 
refused to cheer for me, and if Director Day had stayed away from the 
meeting where the Resolutions were passed he would now be feeling more 
like I feel. I feel more enthusiastic than ever in regard to my work, 
despite the fact that I have "forfeited the confidence and good will that 
might have been given me by my colleagues in any sincere and well-ordered 
effort to uphold a high standard of conduct in the student body." And 
I shall continue to work for the moral progress of the students in American 
colleges and universities, among which Carnegie Tech may hardly be 
included after allowing the British and French elements within her gates 
to down American ideals and oust American teachers. 

But now let us try to forget about the source and the author of the 
Resolutions and as to just how and why they were passed. Let us state 
tersely that the Resolutions have been passed and must now go on record 
as a part of the history of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. The 
question arises: Are they Resolutions to be proud of? Under the disguise 
of dislike for the non-sugar-coated truths of a reformer, this faculty has 
expressed its lack of interest in moral reform and expressed it without 
the reformer's asking, for his desire for reform was written in a personal 
letter to the president that was not intended for general reading. The 
fact that the General Faculty voted to change "the confidence and good 
will that would have been given" to "the confidence and good will that 
might have been given" is further indication of indifference to the 
reformer's end, irrespective of their dislike for his means. Disguise or no 
disguise, the Carnegie Institute of Technology then is not strong for moral- 
ity. Director Day's belief that "men must have vices before they can 
love one another" has taken root, and the General Faculty have condemned 
the attacks of the only one of its members who had sincerely and vigorous- 



20 . • 

ly written to the president to have it eradicated. These Eesolutions have 
helped to accomplish the dismissal of the reformer. The dismissal is not 
a blow to his reputation but a blow to the reputation of the ' ' educational ' ' 
institution which has permitted it. Such an institution, despite any other 
virtue which it chances to possess, is a disgrace not only to Pittsburgh but 
to educational America as a whole. 

I do not care to appear so conceited as to state that an institution is a 
disgrace merely because it has permitted my dismissal; it is a disgrace 
because it has dismissed the standards which I hajipen to uphold. If such 
standards had been evident in general, I would naturally not have called 
attention to their absence. I do not mean to infer by this that there are no 
morally-fit students at the school, for, in my five years there, I have had 
under my instruction as fine a type of manhood as I have ever taught or 
ever hope to teach. But Ave know that the majority of our boys have 
tendencies which can be checked only by the ideals which a school sets up 
and helps to work out for its students. It is not sufficient to have some 
boys in it with ideals that they themselves live up to; it is necessary for 
the school itself to have ideals that it lives up to. But the Carnegie 
Institute of Technology is incontrovertibly A School Without Ideals. 

Consider, for example, the Poverty-Day Parade. Prizes are offered to 
those freshmen who best dej)ict poverty in their costumes and make-up, and 
sometimes the prize goes to him who has no costume at all except the 
scantiest most suggestive covering possible. The reward of the winner is 
immunity from all the traditional restrictions which are imposed on the 
freshmen by upperclassmen. The idea of a competition in restrainlessness, 
not to mention the notion of freeing the most restraintless student from 
all further restraint, is — it nmst be admitted — a very demoralizing one and 
mighty bad stuff" on which to nourish the minds of freshmen. Poverty 
Day at Carnegie Tech is nothing more than a day reserved for the celebra- 
tion of Tech's moral indigence very meagerly "disguised" as pauperism. 
The Poverty-Day Parade is no sooner over when preparations for 
Campus Week are under way. I have never witnessed the climax of this 
publicity generator, but just after leaving the meeting in President Hamer- 
schlag's office on May 10th, 1922, I observed very attractive posters all 
over the campus (and particularly on the official bulletin boards) to the 
effect that Dean (of Men) Tarbell would be drunk and that Dean (of 
Women) Scales would "shimmy" at the Mardi Gras. This sort of adver- 
tising is no doubt encouraged by Dean Tarbell himself, who is Commander- 
in-Chief of all extra-curriculum activities. And yet it Avas at that very 
meeting that President Hamerschlag claimed my mind was '-'irrational" 
because I refused to admit that Dean Tarbell was a high-minded man. 
Hearsay has it that tliis dean allowed a student to go scot-free by con- 
sidering the theft of an automobile as a joke. I believe the report 
thoroughly for the selfsame dean once 'phoned to me personally to 
inform my class that if the guilty student who had stolen another 
student 's raincoat Avould return it to the dean 's office, no further 
mention would be made of the fact and no action taken. Dean Tarbell 
is a Poverty-Day enthusiast. The president must have show^n bim my 
Poverty-Day letter, for shortly afterwards the Faculty Bulletin an- 
nounced that Dean Tarbell was taken suddenly ill — a blood-vessel had 
burst in his head, incapacitating him for the rest of the college j'ear. 
While my letter to the president probably furnislied the bullet, the 



21 

president himself must plead guilty for the shooting. 

The blame in nine cases out of ten for such moral laxity in a college 
must go to its president and is generally a reflection of his own sense of 
irresponsibility and lack of restraint. Boys, despite their immoral ten- 
dencies, can be inspired to live clean and honest lives if high examples 
are set before them not merely by a few classmates but by those more 
mature men in high offices. You may establish a Y. M. C. A. and a score 
of similar student organizations, but they all degenerate into mere shams 
as long as your institution is presided over by a man whose character 
is revealed by the fact that he appoints or uses his influence in having 
appointed directors who believe that "men must have vices before they 
can lov,e one another, ' ' deans who permit petty crimes among the students 
to go unpunished and who gain publicity for the school by staging orgies 
that reek with vulgarity, health officers who preach that cigarettes are 
harmless, heads of departments who have no longer the desire or the 
ability to take an interest in anything other than their salaries, chairmen 
of scholarship committees who are so soft-hearted as to violate strictly 
the rules in your "White" Book in order to maintain a big enrollment 
without regard r,o quality, and finally — a faculty which is forced to give 
up its confidence in and to help oust the professor who strives to uphold 
a high moral standard in the student-body. Such are the conditions at 
the Carnegie Institute of Technology which is evidently badly in need 
of a thorough house-cleaning — a house-cleaning that will prove successful 
only if it is begun at the very top which is the source of all the evil. 

Carnegie Tech is going down hill. Her only hope lies in ousting the 
man who is guiding her in that direction, and there are indications that 
he will be ousted. President Hamerschlag is considered a big man in 
Pittsburgh and is, I hear, "particularly popular with the ladies." That 
he is easily influenced by the latter is evident from the part in this 
affair which has been played by Mrs. Hamerschlag. But he is neither 
big nor popular on the campus of the institution over which he presides 
■ — -neither in the eyes of the faculty nor in the eyes of the students. 
This fact is of course kept secret, but institutional disrespect for him is 
as general as it is suppressed. Occasionally it comes to the surface in 
a jocular manner as, for example, when an entertainment, attended by 
both faculty and undergraduates, depicts him flirting with a chorus girl, 
when everybody laughs — the president included. 

Incidentally I might add that when I called at his oflS.ce five years 
ago to ask for a position on the faculty of the school, I found him 
unreservedly, even boastfully, comparing, with a certain Professor of 
Psychology, the charms of the chorus girls in a musical comedy they had 
both seen the night before. I did not take it seriously at the time, but 
I naturally considered it a rather unusual topic of conversation for a 
college president and, for that reason, I was never quite able to expel 
the impression of the little tete-a-tete from my mind. In the meanwhile 
it has been recalled and nourished by hearsay and, in particular, by 
Professor Keller's claim that President Hamerschlag is sensual, which, 
when coupled with Director Day's own confession and philosophy, 
explains the love of these two latter men for each other. It is queer that 
President Hamerschlag is amused by his own cheap and foul reference 
to carnal matters but considers as "irrational" the mind of the man 
who writes him a serious letter in which the things of the flesh are 



called by their perfectly proper names. He is undeniably not a clean- 
minded person capable of dealing plainly and seriously with the physical 
forces that ruin men, and it is not improbable that his wife's reference 
to my "perverted state of mind" is merely a perverted reference to the 
mind of her own husband who stubbornly refuses to think of sex in other 
than a vulgar or passionate sense. I have never yet heard him announce 
a marriage on the faculty without a suggestive grin. To me his face spells 
sensualism from ear to ear, and I cannot comprehend how any respectable 
girl on the Commencement stage could take a diploma from his hand 
without using it immediately afterwards to smite the voluptuous smile 
from his lips. 

Dr. Thurstone of Tech's Department of Psychology makes a claim 
to the effect that "the mug has nothing to do with the nut." The 
publication of such a belief may be one way of diverting attention from 
very obvious indications of undesirable conduct; for I prefer to agree 
with Emerson that "men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces 
which expose the whole movement," although I realize that the faces 
appear more transparent to careful and competent observers than to 
those of lesser insight who must resort to fallible psychological tests. 
There are some, of course, who neither study the face nor use the test 
— some who actually know that others are immoral — some who can prove 
it conclusively and "swear to it before God." And yet it would not 
only pollute these pages but weaken my charges were I to publish the 
stories that some persons (who know) are anxious to tell me, although 
I would willingly believe every word. But there are some instances 
where it is far more effective and even more truthful to omit facts — to 
leave it to the reader's imagination. President Hamerschlag's physi- 
ognomy and the stand he has taken against virtue and morality in this 
whole affair — the greatest and most reliable of all psychological tests — 
are two keys which, when used together, should liberate the imagination 
to acts corroborated by every step he takes and by every breath he draws. 

Immorality, however, is very, very common among men, and even 
the public knowledge of it would be the last reason for removing some 
of them from important ofl&ces — not, however, the ofl&ce of educatoi*. 
The low ideals and acts of a college president may be discussed seriously 
and secretly among both students and faculty, or even referred to 
humorously at public gatherings — but if the matter is once brought 
before the people seriously, out he goes. 

Serious public discussion of the president's morals may be suppressed 
for diplomatic reasons; but there is another reason which accounts for 
suppression in this case. President Hamerschlag, as I have pointed out 
before, exercises a certain mesmeric power over practically all those 
who deal with him, by means of which he forces them to say or to leave 
unsaid just what he wants. His control over Professor Keller at the 
meeting in his oflS.ce was complete and a conclusive indication of Pro- 
fessor Keller's mental debility. This mesmerism is quite similar to that 
by means of which some men and some women force others into sexual 
submission and is, therefore, particularly effective for suppressing ex- 
poses of sexual impurity. President Hamerschlag is not the first mes- 
merist with whom I have had to deal. I knew I could crush his power, 
and he knew that I would; otherwise, he would have enjoyed having me 
alone in his oflS.ce — a thing which he feared from the first. To crush the 



23 

power of a mesmerist demands three things: mental determination, the 
moral courage to outgaze the cold gray stare of his dilated eyes, and the 
physical purity which indicates that one has never yielded to the three 
degrading masters — Nicotine, Alcohol and Prostitution. 

What I had done led to a decided disclosure of the institute's dis- 
respect for its president: on the part of the faculty by the utter omission 
of his name from a set of Eesolutions drawn up to condemn "the direct 
charges and covert insinuations" against himself as well as against 
those mentioned; on the part of the students by their willingness to 
circulate a printed Letter in which he was called a contemptible hypocrite. 
Genuine loyalty for one's president would never have permitted these 
things. The circulation of the Letter alone, without the frantic efforts 
of a rabid French poodle, would have been more than enough to drive 
me out of my classroom and off the campus. Disrespect is a powerful 
force for driving over-placed men from office, but it must lose its sup- 
pressed form before it can become dynamic and effective. It must not 
remain in dark recesses where whispering conspirators lurk; it must find 
healthful expression in the whistling wind on a sun-lit hilltop, the roar- 
ing water in a clear mountain-torrent and the lusty cheers of inspired 
youths clamoring for the removal of all that is foul and urfjust and for 
the advent of all that is clean and strong and right. 



P A E T II 

The printed letter which I had circulated was evidently shown to some 
persons other than those connected with the institute — or probably I 
myself had sent it to some person connected both with the institute and with 
a Newspaper, for a reporter from a Pittsburgh Paper called at my home, 
stating that the Paper thought I had a very good case against President 
Hamerschlag and asking both for additional information and for permission 
to publish it. I remained true to my promise and gave him neither, but 
I told him I would prepare my story and have it ready for his paper in 
case I did not receive a letter of reinstatement from the trustees on or 
before Commencement Day (June 16th, 1922). He said he doubted if the 
news item could be held that long, to which I responded that I could not 
prevent the Paper from printing it although I would certainly regret their 
doing so. 

The appearance of the reporter was the first indication the members of 
the family had of my being involved in an affair, for I had kept it an 
absolute secret outside of the institute. But I felt they should be informed 
before seeing it in the papers, for I had visions of a sensational headline 
on the very morning of Tech's Commencement Day. I informed them and 
also requested them to say nothing of it to outsiders. I also wrote a letter 
to the editor of the Paper, thinking the reporter might not prove altogether 
reliable in conducting my sentiment to him. Since that letter contained 
much that is printed here, I shall avoid duplication by publishing only a 
part of it — my ardent request that no publicity be given to the matter 
before Commencement: "To do otherwise would be to spoil the Commence- 
ment Events, and I have too many friends among the seniors whose 
graduation days I do not wish to mar. It will be unfortunate enough to 



24 

make the matter public even after Commencement ; but it is a thing which 
should be done, however reluctantly, to preserve the democratic character 
of higher learning in America. I shall work on the story to-morrow and 
have it ready for you in good time in case I do not hear from the Trustees." 
I asked the editor to acknowledge the receipt of this letter. 

The story I had intended to forward to the editor was the greater 
portion of Part I of this booklet. I did not, of course, expect him to 
publish all of it, but I wanted him to have my entire story in detail which 
he might condense for as much space as he cared to give it. I began the 
writing of Part I shortly after I had sent my letter to the editor, but I 
was not able to give it my undivided application until I had helped to 
complete the reading of the last set of examination papers and had turned 
in the final grades for my students. In the few days remaining before 
Commencement, I worked on my story constantly; I did not appear at the 
Commencement Exercises, partly because I wanted the extra time to finish 
it, chiefly because I did not care ever to march again in a procession led by 
a hyprocrite of President liamerschlag 's caliber. The reader will observe 
that Part I was written to the effect that the letter had not been received 
from the trustees, although there was still a possibility of that letter 
arriving whil^ I was writing the story. (I had liowever, at that time, turned 
in the keys to my classroom and to my desk at .Director Day's request — - 
written by Professor Keller; perhaps the president wanted to communicate 
this fact to the trustees.) I never for a moment stopped entertaining the 
thought that I was writing my story for the waste-basket, where it would 
have gone immediately after I had received favorable word from the Board. 
But the letter from the trustees came not before or on Commencement Day. 

Nevertheless I did not send my story to the editor for no other reason 
than for the fact that he did not even acknowledge the receipt of my 
confidential letter. In this respect he was not unlike President Hamerschlag, 
and perhaps, like President Hamerschlag, he had not even regarded it as 
confidential. The fact that it was sent by registered mail was however, a 
sufficient guarantee that he had received it. The editor 's disinclination to 
acknowledge my letter led me to doubt the sincerity of his Paper. I might 
add that a certain remark of the reporter had aroused my suspicion as to 
the real purpose of his visit. But in a case of this kind, one's suspicions 
are easily and often falsely aroused, and it is better neither to take them 
too seriously nor to ignore them altogether. However, no notice of any 
kind appeared in this particular or in any other Pittsburgh Paper. Perhaps 
the editor and the reporter, not having received my story, thought I had 
been reinstated. Perhaps? But I would ra,ther believe that they knew 
more of the other side than I did, for newspaper men are sometimes 
members of the Board of Trustees. 



P A E T III 

In my printed Letter I had given the trustees until Commencement Day 
to reinstate me; the fact that I had received no word from them by that 
time relieved me of my promise to keep the matter a public secret. I would 
willingly have given Part I of this booklet to a reliable newspaper im- 
mediately after Commencement, and I owe it to the seemingly unreliable 



25 

one that I would have had it ready for the asking. But I had not, in my 
printed Letter, specified how or when I would publish my story. I had, in 
fact, not thought of the newspapers at all as my first medium for publicity; 
it was my original intention to publish my story in pamphlet-form to be 
circulated at American institutions of learning not immediately after the 
Tech Commencement, when our colleges and universities either had closed 
or were about to close, but at the opening of the next college-year in the 
Fall of 1922. 

And that is why I laid my story aside after Commencement and left 
for the countryside. 

The countryside! The countryside and its great free meadows of 
waving green, fragrant with clover, vibrant with whistling quail and 
bumble-bees, and foaming with innumerable daisies! An azure sky with 
snowy clouds, following a stormy one with veins of fire! Oceans of fresh 
air which has been purified by the restless wind and triumphant thunder, 
mellowed by the sun's golden shine and cooled by gentle rains and silver 
starlight ! There I was,, shut off from all communication with the Carnegie 
Institute of Technology: no telephone — not even a newspaper. Nevertheless, 
despite the absence of radio-equipment, I received numerous messages in 
the very top of a cherry tree whose branches, with the occasional but 
insignificant help from a friendly blackbird, I was relieving of their weight 
of scarlet fruit. There is no better place to communicate with the Almighty 
Lover of Truth and Justice than in the solitude of His great out-of-doors 
devoid of all the inventions of man. 

After a week's sojourn, I returned to my desk with new messages and 
inspirations to revise and invigorate the writing of my story — in particular, 
those parts in which I had upbraided President Hamerschlag. On the 
evening of June 27th, 1922, I had practically completed Part I as it is 
printed in this booklet. I did not know that the Triistees of the Carnegie 
Institute of Technology were holding a meeting that same evening, for 
since my departure before Commencement absolutely no communication had 
passed between myself and any one connected with the school. It may be 
true, however, that the human brain can serve as an "instrument" both 
for broadcasting and for receiving messages. Mrs. Hamerschlag had written 
to me "how husband appears so harassed at times," and Director Day had 
told me that the president was ' ' very much worried over my letter ; ' ' my 
second registered letter, in which I said I was going to prove that he 
"should be ousted as President of the Carnegie Institute of Technology," 
may therefore have thrown Ms mind into a final, particularly receptive 
state for telepathic purposes, all the more so because he had shown it 
freely to others. Whether or not it is possible for one human mind to read 
the thoughts of another before they are published, the fact is that on the 
morning of June 28th, 1922, the Pittsburgh Papers announced that Dr. 
Hamerschlag had quit as President of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. 

At the same meeting the trustees retired Dr. Holland, Head of the 
Carnegie Museum, and Director Beatty of the Department of Pine Arts, 
"following the precedents set by Harvard, Yale and the University of 
Pittsburgh, as all of those institutions had recently retired their presidents 
with the rank of Emeritus." Both of these men had passed the age of 
seventy years. The fact that the trustees referred to the retiring of college 
presidents in connection with the retirement of these directors enabled one 
to read between the lines and formulate a more intimate view of the meet- 



26 

ing of the Board; for President Hamerschlag was the only one of the three 
whose "retirement" suggested the analogy, but he is too young a man to 
be compared with Hadley or Eliot, although it is a question whether or not 
the minds of these men are still better fitted for the position of a college 
executive than President Hamerschlag 's mind was or ever will be. 

In connection with President Hamerschlag 's resignation, President 
Church of the Board of Trustees said: 

"The trustees acted with great reluctance in accepting Dr. Hamer- 
schlag 's resignation as president of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. 
Dr. Hamerschlag has for the past three years been desirous of being relieved 
from his position as head of the technical schools but has been urged by 
members of our board to continue in that capacity until certain formative 
plans in connection with the school, which he himself had inaugurated, 
co'ild be carried to completion. Last winter when Dr. Hamerschlag again 
brought up the question of his resignation, the board unanimously granted 
him four months' leave of absence with permission to take a trip abroad, 
with the hope that he might then be prevailed upon to continue in his 
present task, but he has received so many tempting offers to make other 
connections, which will not only give him larger financial rewards but will 
enable him to be relieved of the arduous labors of school work, that he has 
left the board no other alternative than to break the official ties at this 
time." 

I should like to state a few facts to be considered collaterally with 
these statements by President Church. 

Of course it would have been very convenient for President Hamerschlag 
to have resigned three years ago, for it was just at that time made 
known that he had become an annuitant by Andrew Carnegie's will. 
But I am not so certain that President Hamerschlag would have acquiesced 
to resignation then for any other reason — on the contrary, I believe he 
would have been quite reluctant to do so. But I know that there were 
reasons why others at that time wanted not only his resignation but even 
his dismissal in case the former could not be tactfully brought about. 

It was three years ago that the big campaign for increasing teachers' 
salaries were being conducted and when the Faculty of the Carnegie 
Institute of Technology all but went on a strike, one professor going so 
ridiculously far as to claim that his salary was too low to enable him to buy 
a pair of good shoes. The faculty meetings grew so spirited in those days 
that newspaper reporters were seeking admittance and special ' ' detectives ' ' 
had to he appointed to keep out the disguised intruders. It was finally 
necessary for President Hamerschlag to appear in person, and, after forcibly 
prohibiting any one (not only newspaper reporters but even the faculty 
secretary) from recording' his words, he promised salaries as high as those 
paid at any other technical school. "There was a time," he said, "when 
I had simply to ask one man — my friend, Mr. Carnegie — for funds and 
receive any amount I desired." Mr. Carnegie's death had occured just a 
few months before this, and he had not willed anything directly to Carnegie 
Tech, leaving her future endowment in the hands of the Carnegie Corpora- 
tion. But President Hamerschlag found it a different matter dealing with 
the Carnegie Corporation. In fact the Carnegie Corporation in New York 
refused to deal with him until they had made a survey of the school at 
Pittsburgh. One result of the survey was that the School of Applied 
Psychology became a mere Department, although President Angell of the 



27 

Corporation was himself a pyschologist, and Professor Bingham who was 
Director of the School is one of his disciples. But President Hamerschlag 
had been inveigled into squandering money by others than his pet 
psychologists with the result that more than one of the institute's essential 
interests and purposes had to suffer; and finally, when the Corporation did 
furnish additional funds, they were used, among other things, to buy such 
immediate necessities as crayon and blue books, and teachers' salaries were 
comparatively neglected. But such details were hushed and smoothed over, 
and President Hamerschlag was sent away to recuperate. It is interesting 
to note how President Church says that President Hamerschlag had ' ' been 
urged by members of the hoard to continue" but that "the hoard 
unanimously granted him four months' leave of absence." 

When President Hamerschlag returned from abroad after Tech was 
again on her feet financially, he had no intention of resigning. You may 
think I am very bold to contradict the president of the Board of Trustees 
in this matter, but I happen to know more than President Church in this 
particular instance, and I have it in black and white from one who knows 
Dr. Hamerschlag far better than President Chiirch knows him. At the 
meeting in the president's office on May 10th, 1922 (the meeting which I 
did not wish to attend), he informed me that there were no secrets between 
him and his wife. Hence we may accept as true the following statement 
in Mrs. Hamerschlag 's answer to my Poverty -Day letter (the italics 
being mine) : 

"Happily the great desire toward righteousness pervades all like 
God's sunshine, and my husband realizing this, will smile and go forward 
with his worJc, thankful for the cooperation of those who know that big 
work can be done by kindly and constructive criticism." 

It was this paragraph that I had inscribed in the copy of my play 
The Great Reliever, which I sent to Mrs. Hamerschlag. 

Does this authentic statement sound as though the President had 
intended to resign? 

Much as my first letter worried the president, I did not think my 
second registered letter would increase his worry to the degree that 
necessitated resignation almost immediately after he had presented the last 
diploma on the stage at Carnegie Music Hall. The mere knowledge that I 
was making a study of him seemed to be sufficient proof of his own guilt 
to himself. And yet I should have known he would lack the courage to face 
his faculty in the Fall of 1922 after they had read Part I of this booklet. 
He must have suffered a veritable hell, thinking I might possibly publish 
something before he stepped out on the Commencement stage. Perhaps that 
"newspaper reporter" was sent by him to reconnoitre; if so, how it must 
have strengthened him to read .the letter I had written to the editor! 

And yet it will be considered "viciously low" to regard Mrs. 
Hamerschlag 's letter as an "official" communication. So let us forget 
personal letters and accept President Church 's official truth that ' ' Dr. 
Hamerschlag has for the past three years been desirous of being relieved 
from his position as the head of the Technical Schools" and that he "left 
the Board no other alternative than to break the official ties at this time." 
In other words, let us believe faithfully that President Hamerschlag had 
fully intended to resign on July 1st, 1922 — the exact date when his 
resignation took place. 

But let us also make use of this official truth in a further analysis of 



28 

President Hamerschlag 's character: 

It was just a little more than two months before July 1st, 1922, that 
he returned from Europe and received my Poverty-Day letter. Previous to 
the receipt of this letter, neither President Hamerschlag nor Director Day 
nor Professor Keller had said a word to indicate my "unfitness" to teach 
at the institute. On the contrary there had been every indication of the 
very opposite sentiment. I had received the regular annual increase in 
salary each successive year (without demanding it or in any way express- 
ing dissatisfaction aloBg that line), and had been promoted to the rank of 
assistant professor. Just a short while before the president returned, I 
had received a letter from Director Day congratulating me on the good 
work done by my students during the first semester of 1921-22, and at 
the risk of being considered an egotist I am going to add that it had come 
to me indirectly that my students regarded the quality of my teaching as 
the best in the school. (I, of course, am not of this opinion, but at this 
point my own opinion would be irrelevant.) In contrast to all this, I 
should like to state that during the last year (1921-22) other instructors in 
the department were under fire, both by students and by the faculty for 
the poor quality of their instructing, and their dismissal was being 
contemplated. The blame for such conditions, however, should go not so 
much to these instructors as to Professor Keller's indifference toward 
obtaining men of the right caliber and his usual delay in trying to get 
them at the eleventh hour when, owing to the scarcity of college teachers 
during the war and to the fact that other wide-awake Heads had already 
contracted for their services, it was necessary for him to lure instructors 
away from the High Schools by ofiPering them salaries above those received 
by the regular men on his staff with advanced degrees and years of 
experience in teaching at other institutions of higher learning. And, mark 
you, one of these very men was retained (and at a still higher salary, I 
believe) after his dismissal had been agreed upon — while I was dismissed 
after I was told there had been no question whatever when my name was 
reached on the list of candidates for the coming year. 

But we are forgetting that my dismissal was due, not to my inability 
to teach Mathematics, but to my "mental irrationality." However, my 
"irrational" interest in the moral welfare of American college students 
should have been well-known to President Hamerschlag and Director Day 
and Professor Keller long before I displayed it in my Poverty-Day letter. 
I had earlier sent copies of my books or pamphlets to Director Day and 
Professor Keller and had sent them to President Hamerschlag even before 
I had entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology, giving him ample 
chance to discover my ' ' irrationality ' ' then, and to iise it effectively in 
disapproving of my admission. But perhaps President Hamerschlag did 
not read the books: and yet when he acknowledged the receipt of one of 
them he said he had heard good things of it and he told me later he had 
given his copy to an undergraduate to help settle a question about certain 
fraternity matters. About two years ago. President Hamerschlag addressed 
his faculty and announced that he thought the time was ripe for moral 
and religious progress at the institute, and I was asked to serve on a 
committee to inaugurate a morning chapel service. (I declined on the 
ground that the Lord's Prayer was not a thing to be sandwiched between 
two cigarettes.) Finally, just before sailing to Europe, the president 
'phoned to have me call at his office. -I was unable to do so immediately, 



but his secretary later informed me that he had wanted to thank me 
personally for the pamphlet I had sent him at Christmas time explaining 
the good my books had accomplished for Yale and other colleges. 

Then came President Hamerschlag 's return from abroad and my 
expression of disgust at his participation in the vulgar Poverty Day Parade 
— he who thought the time was ripe for moral progress. The story from 
here on has been related in detail, including the part played by Mrs. 
Hamerschlag. My letters to the president and his wife denote no more 
"mental irrationality" than do my books along the same line of thought 
— books which President Hamerschlag had recommended by giving them to 
his students to read. The absurdity of my dismissal on the ground of 
"mental irrationality" must by this time be tiresomely evident to the 
reader. The thing which had harassed and worried the president and his 
wife was not the ' ' mental irrationality ' ' of the critic, but the fact that his 
criticism had been directed against them personally. 

Now if President and Mrs. Hamerschlag had not intended to sever 
connections with the institute, I can understand how their irritation, due 
originally to my criticism and renewed ever afterwards by my presence, 
would have marred the pleasure of their participation in the school 's affairs, 
even though my criticism was not made publicly and even though they had 
decided to preserve its private nature. But we have been informed officially 
that President Hamerschlag had intended to resign on July 1st, 1922. Now 
if I had made my criticism public and made it against his will, I can well 
see how it might have been considered dishonorable for him not to expell 
me, even though he had to serve but two more months as chief executive. 
But my criticism was made privately and at his own invitation. This, how- 
ever, is no reason why it should not have irritated him — in fact, criticism 
is ineifective unless it does irritate — but could he not have suffered his 
invited irritation secretly for the short period of two months and shown a 
broad interest in the school's welfare by not dismissing a professor whose 
past record had been not only satisfactory but also beneficial? Does his 
action indicate a deep impersonal concern over the future of the school he 
had intended to quit, or does it show absolute disregard for the welfare of 
the school under a new executive? Does it not, above all, reveal a low 
selfish desire for personal revenge inflamed by his wife — a desire anxiously 
seeking gratification in the short time still remaining to exercise his 
authority before impotence descended upon him? 

President Hamerschlag 's resignation not only exposes new defects in 
his character but proves and intensifies my earlier charges. It is clear that 
he was interested in the Carnegie Institute of Technology only as long as 
he was, at the same time, working for his own purse and glory. As 
President Church says, he was ready to resign when he "received so many 
tempting offers to make other connections which will not only give him 
larger financial rewards but will enable him to be relieved of the arduous 
tasks of school work." Sacrifice and unselfish deeds he shunned; even an 
act of omission which would have meant prosperity and progress for the 
school but displeasure to himself was out of the question. Whatever good 
he did for the Carnegie Institute of Technology in her prime (when Mr. 
Carnegie was always willing to forgive seemingly unavoidable blunders and 
to cover them over with additional funds), the deliberate harm done by the 
manner of his exit will veil that good in permanent oblivion; for it will 
doubtless be necessary to substitute for the laurel wreath (which, in one of 



30 

his recent Commencement addresses, lie conceitedly claimed would be placed 
in his niche) a perpetual burning candle — of sulphur. 



P A E T IV 

When the trustees announced the resignation of President Hamerschlag, 
they also announced the appointment of Secretary Baker as acting-president. 

Secretary Baker had not been with the institute very long. If I 
recollect rightly I have had but one very short conversation with him. But 
I have seen him very frequently; and if a man's face (when there is no 
cigar in it) is an index to his character, Acting-President Baker should 
make an executive much superior to Ex-President Hamerschlag. But 
Secretary Baker was also a victim of President Hamerschlag 's mesmerism; 
it may be, of course, that the former was merely feigning obedience and 
and reserving his own ideas for the time when he would occupy the position 
to which this very obedience would promote him. But the fact remains 
that Secretary Baker acted very conservatively under President Hamer- 
schlag 's regime — in particular, during his leave of absence. I do not 
believe Secretary Baker sanctioned the Poverty-Day Parade; yet he did 
nothing to stop it or to limit its viciousness. But when the faculty passed 
Eesolutions condemning my "viciousness," Secretary Baker attended the 
meeting as President Hamerschlag 's undisguised spy. However, all of 
this, for diplomatic purposes, was probably more or less necessary, and now 
that he had been officially relieved of further submission to such a master 
and had become acting president himself, I had a splendid chance to 
ascertain his real eharactei by testing his independence. 

But it was just as splendid a chance for Acting-President Baker as it 
was for myself.' If, as Secretary, he had withheld his desire to improve 
the institution, to do some house-cleaning himself and to usher in new 
ideals, he now had not only the freedom but a golden opportunity — the kind 
that comes but once in a lifetime — to do so. The step would require courage 
(for many heads would oppose it), but courage is the one thing that 
instrinsically fosters progress. However necessary the appearance of this 
little booklet seems to the welfare and progress of Higher Education in 
America, its suppression by the author himself (not by outside forces) 
would have completely regenerated one educational institution in particular: 
for that suppression could not possibly have been brought about except 
by reinstating him — the only act that would have indelibly indicated to the 
students and the faculty that the school had reinstated the ideals for which 
he had been dismissed. Of course I had set Commencement Day as the 
latest date on which I would accept reinstatement by the trustees, but I 
did not, at the time, realize the institution would be placed under a new 
head so soon thereafter. So I broke my resolve in consideration of Tech's 
new executive, who alone could effectively lead a movement for my return 
if he really desired it. 

On Independence Day, 1922, I wrote Acting -President Baker a long 
letter. I shall not publish it in toto since it contains much detail that 
has already been printed here, but I shall condense its argument as 
follows: that my printed Letter was true, that it was needed to show the 
trustees, the faculty and the students the shallow reasons for my dismissal 



31 

and the unfitness of the judges who perpetrated it, that I had not sent 
out copies of the Letter indiscriminately to injure the school's public 
reputation, that I firmly believed that both students and faculty ia general 
disapproved of their president's action, that the indirect expression of 
seeming approval by the faculty had been obtained in a forced and under- 
hand way to influence the trustees, that the trustees therefore did not re- 
instate me before Commencement, that I did therefore intend (according 
to my Letter) to air the injustice publicly, that the publication was 
providentally withheld until the president's resignation and his own ap- 
pointment as acting-president were announced, that the publication would be 
a disastrous introductory blow to Carnegie Tech under his guidance, that Dr. 
Hamerschlag 's recommendation was now no longer necessary, that my past 
record and advancement at the school were sufficient recommendation, that 
I would be delighted to have my ' ' irrational mind ' ' submit to a comparative 
examination with the "rational mind" that had ousted me, that the whole 
matter could then be adjusted and that the only knowledge of the adjust- 
ment (as far as its coming from me was concerned) would be my re- 
appearance in the classrooms at the opening of the Fall term, but that I 
would accept reinstatement only on the condition that it be preceded by 
either the resignation or the dismissal of both Professor Keller and Director 
Day, that I was willing to wait until September 1st, 1922, for a decision, 
that if I heard on or before that time a decision unfavorable to the 
intellectual and moral welfare of Carnegie Tech, I would do my share to 
put her off the map of Pittsburgh. 

CAENEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
Pittsburgh, Pa. 

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT 

July 6th, 1922. 
My dear Dr. Gundelfinger: 

I acknowledge your registered letter of July fourth and the jjackage 
of books you sent to me at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association. 

The Board of Trustees has already sanctioned the action of Dr. 
Hamerschlag in not asking you to return next year to the institute. I am 
therefore not in a position to ask them to reconsider this question. Further- 
more, as contracts have already been given to Director Day and Professor 
Keller for next year it would be quite impossible for me to demand their 
withdrawal. 

Very truly yours, 

Thomas S. Baker. 

The fact that Acting-President Baker answered my btter almost im- 
mediately shows that he could not have passed it around tj several others, 
but must have acted entirely on his own responsibility, which, however, was 
the only (if any) responsibility needed for such an answer. But his prompt- 
ness in answering also indicates that he wanted to get the matter off his 
hands as quickly as possible. I had given him two months time in which 
to make a decision. If he had had the slightest desire to see me reinstated, 
he would have taken advantage of this long interval for deliberation, taking 
into account the possibility of happenings and developments in the mean- 
while which might have lessened opposition and even changed it into favor 
either voluntary or compulsory. If, however, Acting-Presidant Baker was 



32 

absolutely in favor of my not returning or if he considered my return quite 
impossible under any circumstances whatever, then his immediate answer 
was commendable — and considerate in that it relieved me of two months of 
suspense. That Dr. Baker had no genuine desire to have me return is 
evident from his remark: "I am therefore not in a position to ask them 
(the trustees) to reconsider this question." For if men's hearts desire 
things, they soon manage to get in a position to ask even though they may 
not receive. Dr. Baker tried to make my return seem also impossible on 
account of my own stipulations, but I object to his expression: "impossible 
for me to demand their (Director Day's and Professor Keller 's) withdraw- 
al." I did not specify how these two men were to be removed from office, 
and the last method I would have suggested would have been to demand 
their withdrawal. I believe Professor Keller could easily have been 
persuaded to retire owing to his age and general debUity, and I know 
Director Day could have been persuaded to resign for he told his faculty 
in the Fall of 1921 that he woiiJd resign if conditions did not improve — and 
God (if no one else) knowfe they haven't and couldn't under his guidance. 
In fact I was told Director Day was contemplating to resign in June, 1922, 
and I believe it will be a source of life-long regret to him that he didn't. To 
me, Dr. Baker's letter clearly indicates unwillingness to have me return, 
although he does not say so openly. This unwillingness is due both to a 
lingering respect for Dr. Hamerschlag and perhaps to a view of having the 
adjective removed from his own title. 

But while Dr. Baker ^s letter had failed to reveal the character and the 
independence which I had anticipated, it was a very welcome letter other- 
wise in that it enlightened me officially in regard to two matters on which 
I had had, up to |;hat time, no definite information. 

One of these was the attitude of the trustees. I did not know definitely 
if they had sanctioned President Hamerschlag 's action in dismissing 
me. Of course (according to my printed Letter) the fact that I had not 
heard from them was a sufficient indication. Nevertheless, even an un- 
favorable actual reply from the trustees would have been honorable and 
appreciated, for I knew my printed Letter to them had not been officially 
ignored; it had indeed come to me indirectly and accidentally that the 
trustees, at a meeting before Commencement, had decided to stand by the 
president. However, until I had received Dr. Baker's letter, I had no way 
of proving by black and white that I had actually been dismissed. Unless 
I had received some official notice of this, I would not have been entirely 
willing to publish this booklet. Furthermore, in my registered letter to 
President Hamerschlag I had promised that "my study (of him) shall not 
be made public until I have been notified officially of my dismissal," and 
in my printed Letter I had stated explicitly that I did not consider his own 
action and notice as final. I wanted to live up to all my promises, and I 
have. To me these things were all essential, however trivial and trying they 
may appear to the reader. 

The second matter cleared officially by Dr. Baker's letter was the 
information that both Director Day and Professor Keller had been given 
their contracts. If these two m.en had no longer been connected with the 
institute when this booklet first appeared, it would have rendered the situa- 
tion rather flat. From all appearances, President Hamerschlag recommended 
both of them for another year before he himself resigned. I am much 
amused at this fact when I think of President Hamerschlag 's reasons for 



not being able to recommend me and when I think of the confession made 
before him by Director Day and of the opinions of the president held by 
Professor Keller. 

The appointment of Professor Keller to continue as Head of the Depart- 
ment of Mathematics leaves that department with a very uninspiring 
leader; and its members, even though several of them are new men, will, 
despite all efforts to suppress my earlier published attack on him, soon 
discover his short-comings and, if they possess any merit and vigor what- 
ever, gradually become dissatisfied and disinterested. Students under his 
direct instruction will acquire his nonelialant mood. Professor Keller, how- 
ever, will not encourage immorality; neither will he make any effort to 
stamp it out. 

But in reappointing Director Day, President Hamerschlag has seen 
to it that the moral laxity, which he favors, will be perpetuated after his 
resignation. Director Day's supreme position for exerting a great influence 
on the student-life of the entire institute is undeniable. There are four 
schools of undergraduates at the Oarnegie Institute of Technology. 
Although the schools are distinct in themselves and become more and more 
distinct in their educational aims as their courses advance, nevertheless the 
freshmen and even the sophomores in each school take some common subjects 
as Mathematics, English, History, Languages, Physical Training, etc. 
which are grouped as General Studies. Those who teach these General 
Studies constitute a fifth faculty whose members, while they teach in all 
four schools, are not engaged by the directors of these schools but by 
Director Day of the Faculty of General Studies. While Director Day has 
no students under his direct supervision, he is responsible for the selection 
of this group of teachers Avho instruct the students in all four schools and 
(note this particularly) instruct them when they are freshmen and most 
susceptible to impressions which will affect the rest of their college life 
and their life after graduation. Establish as many religious customs and 
activities as you will, it is through the regular compulsory daily attendance 
in the classroom that youth can be and is most effectively influenced by 
ideal instructors who have sterling moral qualities in addition to scholarly 
ones. That Director Day is entirely unfit to select teachers for these 
important positions I have already pointed out; and no one can claim more 
authentically than myself that he actually favors and works to bring about 
the dismissal of those teachers who attempt to counteract the influence of 
his own degrading "ideals." 

All of this was pointed out in my letter to Acting-President Baker. He 
has seemingly ignored it. Why, then, did I not make a final appeal by 
sending an official letter directly to the trustees? Because official appeals 
to the trustees should come through the president of the school; further- 
more, whether the appeal was to be official or otherwise, I felt it would be 
effective only if it came to them through and endorsed by the 7!ew executive. 
I had already communicated directly with the trustees: I had sent each one 
of them not only a copy of my printed Letter, but also circulars explaining 
the good reform work I had helped to accomplish for Yale — circulars 
containing words of recognition and appreciation from the Trustees of Yale 
herself. Euthermore some of the Tech Trustees are Yale graduates, and 
my name and aim need no introduction or explanation to a single alumnus 
of my Alma Mater.- My direct appeal to the Trustees of the Carnegie 
Institute of Technology could not have been stronger. 



34 

At the same time, I am not claiming that I should have been their 
sole source of information representing the other side in this affair. If 
the trustees had been wide-awake they would have observed what other 
college presidents were saying at the very time when they themselves were 
agreeing with President Hamerschlag. They should have considered the 
matter in its relation to other institutions and not with reference to 
Carnegie Tech as a unit in itself. President Angell of Yale, President 
Lowell of Harvard and President Hibben of Princeton in their baccalaure- 
ate sermons in June 1922 Tvere all preaching against the moral laxity in 
our colleges and universities, while President Hamerschlag and the Tech 
Trustees were upholding it. The campaign of the Big Three was the subject 
of articles in various periodicals at the time. Perhaps the special article 
by President Butler of Columbia University in the Pittsburgh Sunday 
Disimtch (July 9th, 1922) came a little too late, but it must have given the 
Tech Trustees and Acting-President Baker and Dr. Hamerschlag food for 
reflection. The main headline of this article was: Modern Education Fails. 
Among the sub-headlines were the following: Every Country, and Especial- 
ly America, Is Suffering Now Because Maturity Is Misleading Youth — 
Graduated Youths Are III Prepared for Life Work — Education Has Turned 
Prom Paths of Wisdom Into Those of Crude Sensualism — This Year 's 
Classes, Just Sent Into World, Badly Treated by Their Elders. Certainly 
Maturity misleading Youth into tlie Path of Crude Sensualism would have 
been an exquisite title for the picture of President Hamerschlag at the 
head of the Poverty-Day Parade. 

Another direction in which the Tech Trustees showed blindness was 
the present crusade limiting and barring the Jews in and from American 
colleges. I should like to say that some of the brightest, cleanest and most 
mannerly persons with whom I, in my educational experiences, have come 
in contact both in the classroom and on the faculty, have been of Jewish 
descent. I cannot, however, say this concerning Dr. Hamerschlag. I must 
also add that I have had to deal with some Jews who were stupid or tricky, 
and unclean — unclean mentally, morally and physically; but their condition 
was not due solely to the fact that they were Jews (as some "leaders" in 
thought would have us believe.) Such characteristics are also only too 
frequent among the Gentiles. After all, should our colleges not strive to 
attract and retain the exceptional man irrespective of his race or national- 
ity, unless he himself is, in addition, a chauvinist. I fear it will be a false 
step with our so-called democratic colleges if they attempt to close their 
doors to all Jews rather than only to undesirable individuals; but I know 
it cannot be other than a fatal blow to that particular American institutioa 
whose trustees have sanctioned the action of a non-Christian president with 
low ideals in ousting a non-Semitic reformer from his faculty. 

One naturally gets the idea that the Tech Trustees are narrow. The 
only redeeming feature of their action is the possibility that it was not 
unanimous. When one glances through the list of names on the Board, one 
observes men of unusual vision among them, but the action taken by the 
trustees as a Board shows these to be in the minority. I have had the 
opportunity to meet or to hear a few of these gentlemen whom, from their 
appearance and speech, I would rate below my better freshmen in the 
quality of ■ their intelligence. Even President Church himself lacks that 
superior intellect and respect for truth that his honorai-y degree from Yale 
would seem to indicate. 



35 

Dr. Hamerschlag shrewdly brought up the matter of my dismissal at an 
earlier meeting of the Board than that at which he announced his intention 
to resign immediately. If he had mentioned both subjects at the same meet- 
ing and in reverse order, the trustees might have acted differently. But 
even so, they should have had vision enough to foresee it all and to be 
guided by bigger principles rather than to be swayed by a mesmerist. The 
most unfortunate thing, however, is that they are still under his influence 
even though he has resigned. Note the following aimouneenient of President 
Church : 

"In appointing Dr. Baker as acting-president of the Institvite of 
Technology, the Board is making temporary provision so as to conserve the 
work which has been done heretofore under Dr. Hamerschlag 's direction, 
and there will be no changes in the policy of the school except perhaps to 
place a little more emphasis upon the spiritual and literary side of the 
educational course." 

Unless the word spiritual (i. e. religious) here implies the forgiving 
of sin (of which forgiving there is already too much at Carnegie Tech), the 
promise of "a little more emphasis on the spiritual side" is blasphemy. 
For there can be no genuine spiritual side without a moral foundation, and 
it is idiotic to attempt the establishment of a moral foundation under a 
director of general studies who believes that men must have vices before 
they can love one another — even though he is descended from Christian 
ministers. 

I hope I have made it clear that, as far as his influence is concerned, 
Dr. Hamerschlag still is and will continue to be President of the Carnegie 
Institute of Technology in spite of his resignation. Call it what you will, 
his is a mysterious power which dominates every one in the school from 
the incoming freshman to the President of the Board of Trustees who 
make every effort to perpetuate his domination by ousting those who are 
too strong morally and too honorable to submit to his desires. He is, of 
course, thoroughly disliked and disrespected, more so now because he has 
withdrawn, but nevertheless he still holds sway. The students of his school 
may love and cheer the reformer, but they unconsciously reveal the deeper 
influence of their former president by hating reform. He has forced the 
trustees to lie in defense of his rottenness. For them to admit the truth 
now would mean not only his — their king's — disgrace, but also their own. 
Hence they will select the other alternative: to continue to lie and lie and 
lie under his complete hypnotic subjection — even after his death, just as 
Quasimodo clung to the yellow skeleton of Esmeralda. 



P A E T V. 

Eetrospection and Pkophecy 

I was born in Pittsburgh. 

Up until the time I entered college, I had received aU my education in 
Pittsburgh. 

After graduating from the Pittsburgh Central High School in the 
Spring of 1903, I entered Yale in the Fall of the same year. But I had no 
sooner completed a three year's undergraduate course at Yale when I 
received the following letter : 



36 

YALE CLUB 

30 West 44th Street 
New York City 

July 5tli, 1906. 
Mr. G. F. Gimdelfinger, 
Dear Sir : 

Your name has been given me by Mr. Marvin, Eegistrar at New Haven, 
as one who might be interested in a position as Assistant to the Eegistrar 
at the Carnegie Technical Schools in Pittsburgh. There is a vacancy of 
this sort at present existing, paying about $65.00 per month with good 
prespects of promotion if satisfactory service is rendered. If you feel 
disposed to look into the matter, application should be made at the schools 
at Pittsburgh, Pa., Schenley Park. 

Yours very truly, 

William P. Field, Assistant Secretary. 



?ie Tech was then only one year old. 

But I had planned to return to Yale on a scholarship to continue the 
study of Mathematics in the Graduate School. In three more years (1909), 
I took my doctorate and was appointed instructor at New Haven for the 
year following. I continued to instruct there until the Spring of 1913 when 
I had reached the maximum salary which Yale at that tmie paid to her 
instructors, and I resigned partly because there was no further promotion 
in sight for the immediate future. 

The newspapers had it that I was dismissed for having published my 
play, The Ice Lens, and that I had written the play because I was dis- 
gruntled for personal reasons. But the truth of the matter is that I had 
begun writing the play in 1911, and the manuscript was being read by 
managers on Broadway at a time when I was being advanced as rapidly as 
Yale had ever advanced an inexperienced instructor. I was entirely satisfied 
with my lot, but completely dissatisfied with the lot (?) of others around me 
— the living conditions among the married instructors owing to meagre 
salaries and the low morale of student life owing to the fact that the 
faculty interest in research had for financial reasons rather than voluntarily 
superseded their interest in the moral and intellectual welfare of the class- 
room. Furthermore the play appeared in print after I had handed in my 
resignation. It was published in February, 1913, and I not only continued 
to teach at the university for four more months, facing severe criticism, 
but even lived during that period as proctor in the fraternity house whose 
very inmates I had censured in my play. The newspapers were wrong, and 
I hope they will now correct the false impression. 

However, the Yale Alumni Weekly refused to mention or advertise 
The Ice Lens — a fact which made me more determined to give further 
publicity to Yale's faults. In fact, my second book was well under way 
before I left the university. It might appear to some that I had resigned 
because I feared to publish a second book and still remain on the campus. 
This was not so. I have no time for courage of the ostentatious variety 
and felt that my lack of fear was made evident enough by the appearance 
of my first book in the middle of the year I resigned. Furthermore, I 
myself would have considered it very unfair to accept another year's salary 
— no matter how small — from the very institution I was so heartlessly 
criticising. My second book — Ten Years at Yale — ^was completed in the 



37 

Fall of 1913 but did not make its sensational appearance in print until 
1915: "The most amazing arraignment of Yale or any other university 
ever published ! ' ' 

I had complimentary copies of Ten Years at Yale sent to the presidents 
of both the advanced educational institutions of Pittsburgh: the University 
and the Carnegie Institute of Technology. 

In 1916 I published my third book — The New Fraternity^a, novel of 
university life, much of which was founded on my experiences at Yale 
although the name Yale did not appear anywhere on its pages. The novel 
received scarcely any mention in the press and no sensational mention 
whatever, probably because it had not been directed against any one 
particular institution but all American institutions of higher learnrug in 
general. I wanted the book to have an audience outside of Yale. 

I wrote to the Eegistrar (now Dean Tarbell) of the Carnegie Institute 
of Technology, asking permission to advertise my book among the students, 
and lie sent me a register to be used as a mailing list. I also sent a 
complimentary copy of the novel to President Hamerschlag, and he 
acknowledged the receipt of it in the following letter: 

CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
Pittsburgh, Pa. 

February 2-ith, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Gundeliinger : 

Thank you very much for sending me a copy of ' ' The New Fraternity. ' ' 
I hope that I may have an opportunity to read it at an early date. I have 
heard good words for it. After I have read your book, I shall write you 
again. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Arthur A. Hamerschlag. 

President Hamerschlag, however, did not "write again" concerning 
the book. 

In the meanwhile war was raging in Europe, and the United States 
was gradually being drawn into the conflict. Eegistration Day in June, 
1917, found me in the hospital recovering from an operation for acute 
appendicitis, early symptoms of which manifested themselves in N§w Haven 
while I was writing The Ice Lens. The remarks about the Avar and other 
things I had heard and seen and experienced at the hospital, together with 
a writer's talent for rearranging them and adding more imaginative 
material, inspired me to construct another play, The Great Believer — my 
first digression from books of a purely academic nature. I wrote the play 
at home while I was convalescing and sent the manuscript to David Belasco 
as soon as I had completed it. 

BELASCO THEATEE 
New York City 

September 19th, 1917. 
Dear Sir: 

The manuscript of your play The Great Eeliever was returned to you 
on September 12th by Adams Express Company, collect, and is evidently 
in your hands by now. 

Yours very truly, 

Thomas A. Curry. 



38 



The returned manuscript was stowed away in my desk and not sent out 
again until it was published in 1922. Shortly after Belasco returned my 
play, I wrote to President Hamerschlag: 

October 9th, 1917. 
My dear Dr. Hamerschlag: 

Although I have never had the pleasure of meeting you personally, I 
feel that I have been introduced through the books I have sent or have had 
sent to you. I refer to Ten Years at Yale and The New Fraternity in 
which I have attempted to express my views (not necessarily unchangeable) 
on certain phases of university life. 

Since I left Yale in 1913 I have not been directly associated with the 
college world but have spent the intervening years in reading, writing, 
publishing and other activities in which I have been self-directed after 
ten years of instruction from and to others. In doing so, I feel that I have 
lifted myself out of the somewhat narrow rut of specializing along 
mathematical lines, and I should now like to return to educational work 
in a broader sense — not necessarily teaching but some position which would 
enable me to come in contact with youth in the making — a contact which 
I have always enjoyed in the past and which I am regretfully missing at 
present. 

If there should be an opening of this kind at the Carnegie Technical 
Schools in the future, near or far, I should indeed appreciate your consider- 
ing my eligibility. 

Yours very faithfully, 

George Frederick Gundelfinger. 

CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
Pittsburgh, Pa. 

October 11th, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Gundelfinger : 

In response to your letter of October 9th, 1917, I regret that owing 
to decreased registration no opening in our organization, such as you 
describe, is at the present time available for your consideration. 

At your convenience I should be glad to have you telephone this office 
to arrange an interview. I will then be in a better position to keep you 
advised of any opening which may occur, due to unexpected call to Govern- 
ment service of members of our staff. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Arthur A. Hamerschlag. 

An interview was arranged for. It was the interview preceded by the 
president's tete-a-tete about chorus girls with another professor of his 
faculty to which I have referred earlier. After the professor's departure, 
the president spoke of various things: He mentioned the school's effort 
to obtain my service in 1906 after I had graduated from Yale; he mentioned 
my book The New Fraternity, stating he had loaned it to one of the 
students to help settle a certain fraternity affair; he spoke (very un- 
intelli gently I thought) about play -writing and play-producing in con- 
nection with the School of Design; and he emphasized (by considerable 



39 

and peculiar use of his eyes) his 100% Americanism by claiming that all 
other interests of the institute would be sacrificed for Government Service 
if the War demanded it. The interview ended in arranging a time for 
another interview with Professor Keller so that he also might "look me 
over. ' ' 

A few days later when I called at the appointed time, Professor 
Keller had "forgotten all about it." A second appointment was necessary. 
As a result I received a contract as part-time instructor in Mathematics 
in the Night School of Applied Science for a very limited period. A month 
later I received an additional contract to instruct Professor Keller's own 
students in the Day School, owing to his departure for the south. The 
latter contract extended from January first to the end of the first semester. 
I was glad for the opportunity to instruct the Day Students, for those in 
the Night School, although very desirous to learn, are too often Avithout 
the requisite ability. The impression made by my instruction is recorded 
ia the following letter: 

CAENEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

Schenley Park 

Pittsburgh 

February 14h, 1918. 
Dear Sir: 

The members of the Mathematical Department of the School of Applied 
Science desire to express to you their appreciation of the assistance you 
rendered the Department last semester. 

The unexpected absence of Professor Keller produced a situation which 
would have been very difficult to handle but for the prompt and efficient 
way in which you assumed the work. We realize that it was a task to 
which you gave considerable thought and attention and we assure you that 
we are deeply gratified for the aid. 

The letter was signed by all the members in the Department of 
Mathematics and by Director Mott of the Science School. 

I was, of course, anxious to continue teaching at the school, but there 
seemed to be no further opportunity duriag the rest of the college year, 
although Director Mott, iu a later letter, wrote: "I am strongly of the 
opinion that there will be one or two vacancies in the Mathematical Depart- 
ment before next Fall, and I shall gladly recommend your name to Dean 
Tarbell (who preceded Director Day as Head of the newly inaugurated 
"Fifth Faculty") for consideration in connection with those vacancies 
should they occur." 

In the meanwhile there had been a vacancy in the Department of 
Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh and with the mutual consent 
of Dean Fetterman and Director Mott I received a contract to teach part- 
time at the University until June 1918. It happened that the times in the 
two contracts over-lapped and for several weeks I was teaching at both 
institutions, crossing the Panther Hollow Bridge at a terrific speed between 
recitations. 

At that time the conditions at the University of Pittsburgh, as com- 
pared with Tech's material equipment, were very bad. I did my instruct- 
ing in a small hut temporarily and cheaply constructed on the side of the 



40 

hill. (The Alumni Hall class rooms were not opened until 1921.) The 
blackboards, lighting, heating, ventilation and sanitation could not have 
been much worse. I shared a desk in a faculty-room containing over a 
dozen of them which were used bv almost as many departments and where 
it was practically impossible to grade test papers owing to the fact that 
almost all the instructors utilized their time, patriotically instead of 
intellectually, by damning the Kaiser and all "pro-Germans." Naturally 
1 was not particularly impressed Avith- the atmosphere of the University 
of Pittsburgh, and even though I realized that I had been there when the 
institution was under the strain of war-time, I was not sorry to receive a 
letter from Secretary Linhart reminding me that "until final action is 
taken, you will, therefore, consider this as a notice that your appointment 
terminates at the end of the present academic year, in accordance with the 
conditions governing your present appointment. ' ' 

The Summer of 1918 found me with no position in view for the coming 
Fall. There were opportunities galore, however, to serve one 's country either 
at the training-camps or overseas. I had already received my Question- 
naire from the Government and had no grounds whatever for exemjjtion. 
But just at the last minute, so to speak, I received a telephone call from 
Professor Keller stating that they needed teachers for the S. A. T. C., and 
asking if I would care to serve. Under the regime of the War Department, 
1 became installed at the Carnegie Institute of Technology to help "to 
train 3,000 soldiers in technical branches for the army," and I remained 
there as full-time instructor after the armistice until my dismissal in June 
of that year when the boys whom I had taught as S. A. T. C. freshmen 
were graduating as civilian seniors. 

When I became a full-time instructor on the Faculty of the Carnegie 
.Institute of Technology I, Avho had been so outspoken in my criticism of 
Yale, resolved to become a very lawful person; not only did the war-time 
regime demand it, but the fact that I was receiving a salary from the 
school naturally put a damper on the freedom one feels to criticise those 
with whom he is not connected and on whom he is not dependent. How- 
ever, the conditions at Carnegie Tech were by no means ideal. President 
Hamerschlag and Professor Keller had both, from the first, appeared to 
me unfit for their positions, and I could not help observe how certain 
features at the institute (in spite of its superior material equipment to 
the University of Pittsburgh) were in greater need of imprt/vement than 
they ^\eve at Yale, to which Alma Mater I continued to send reform 
literature even when the war was at its height. I also sent literature to 
other institutions of learning, realizing, however, that it would not have 
so direct or so strong an appeal. One might go on criticising colleges for- 
ever with little or no effect; it is only after criticising a particular college 
that the critic may eventually lay aside his pen Avith not only the thought 
but also the knowledge that an appreciable amount of good has been ac- 
complished. And, after all, is not the alumnus Avho has seen his Alma 
Mater from the viewpoint of both teacher and taught and seen it through 
eyes unblinded by "loyalty" — is not he the best informed and most 
effective critic 'I 

But even though he is not an alumnus of an institution and even though 
he is being paid by it, there comes a time when the reformer's desire to 
criticise (because that desire seems either dormant or dead in others) 
triumphs over his intention to remain taciturn — if not a desire to criticise 



directly and restraintlessly, at least a desire to criticise indirectly and with 
permission, without expecting big results. One of the things about Carnegie 
Tech that annoyed me in no small degree was the amount of smoking and 
the number of cigarette-butts that littered the halls. I felt that a little 
general criticism about the use of tobacco in colleges would not be out of 
place, and I wrote the following letter for President Hamerschlag: 

March 19th, 1919. 
Dear Sir: — 

Under separate cover I am mailing you a copy of my essay, Prince 
Alljert's Velvet Tuxedo, ten thousand copies of which will soon have been 
mailed to the presidents of all universities and institutions of h.igher learn- 
ing, to the headmasters of all preparatory schools, to the jjrincipals of many 
high schools, to the editors of college and daily papers, and to all the 
college fraternities in the United States. I have received several favor- 
able responses, a certain commissioner of schools recently requesting 300 
additional copies. I find it necessary to print a second edition. 

The object of this letter is to obtain your permission or the permission 
of those whom it may concern to mail a copy of this pamphlet to each 
student in the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Being a member of the 
faculty, I do not feel that I should take the liberty to do this without 
official consent. After obtaining this consent, I shall mail the pamphlets 
to the Pittsburgh addresses at my own expense. I trust this personal effort 
toward reform will meet with your approval; for it seems unfair that I 
should be working for the uplift in American student-life at every 
institution except that one on Avhose faculty I am directly engaged. Much 
as I have enjoyed, am enjoying and will continue to enjoy the teaching of 
Mathematics at "Tech," I heartily and earnestly desire to help her students 
in a moral as well as an intellectual way. 

Yours faithfully, 

George F. Gundelfinger. 

This letter was never sent to President Hamerschlag. I still have it in 
my desk in an addressed and unsealed envelope bearing one of the three- 
cent stamps that were used for some time after the war. I could not bring 
myself to the point of mailing it — not because I felt in advance that he 
would refuse the permission (for I had actually seen him blow smoke in 
his stenographer's face) but because I felt the permission to circulate such 
a pamphlet should come from a Pure Source rather than from mere 
established authority. Whether it was my first "wrong" step or not at 
Carnegie Tech, I did obtain a register and mail about two thousand 
pamphlets to the faculty and students. There was, of course, absolutely 
no direct reference to the school or to any officer of the school, but I hearcl, 
.nevertheless, that my action was much resented by certain persons. I had, 
of course, done it without permission and yet not without thinking about 
permission, although the letter to President Hamerschlag had never been 
read by any one in the original ; it will have been read for the first time by 
others than myself after it has been read in this booklet. 

The act made me very well known throughout the institute although 
I had not done it to gain publicity. Nevertheless, when a special com- 
mittee of the faculty was elected in the Fall of 1919 to arrange for meet- 
ings to discuss the question of salaries and to draw up resolutions ' ' demand- 



42 

ing" an increase, requesting President Haraerschlag to present them to 
the trustees, I found myself one of the members of the committee and the 
only member, I believe, below the rank of assistant professor. Perhaps 
my pamphlet had revealed "courage," and courage was the thing sought 
for in those spirited days. Although I attended all the meetings both of 
the committee and of the general faculty and heard, at the former, remarks 
about President Hamersehlag that members of the committee would not 
have dared to make at the latter, I remained so silent at all times that I 
must have been considered a disappointment and a dismal bore. There 
were, however, some things that I wanted to discuss very much: for 
example, the question as to whether or not the character and ability of 
each individual on the faculty (including the members of the committee) 
were such as to deserve an increase in remuneration. 

The resolutions passed by the General Faculty on November 24th, 
1919, with the request that President Hamersehlag present them to the 
trustees, brought about the almost immediate but ]ion-satisfying action of 
having a small bonus enclosed in the monthly salary envelope from 
December, 1919 until June, 1920, the December bonus not coming until 
the January payment, since the trustees did not act until then, although 
their decision Avas retroactive. 

February 7th, 1920. 
Dear President Hamersehlag: 

I thank you heartily for the adjustment bonus of $20.00 per month 
explained by the note which accompanied my latest salary check. 

I am very much interested in a general rather than in a personal and 
selfish way in the advancement of teaching — a question which has now 
become so important in America that it has been given the main headline 
in some daily papers which are national rather than sensational. My 
interest, however, concerns something deeper than the raising of the 
teacher's salary, although I do not mean to belittle the importance of this 
particular direction which the reform has taken. I believe there is some- 
thing about American education which is more radically wrong than the 
meagre remuneration of the teacher, and I am far from certain that if 
this latter wrong is righted Ave will have applied the ultunate panacea. No 
teacher can do his best if he is underpaid and if living conditions are 
annoyiiig him. It is true that the world has known of geniuses who have 
accomplished wonders in a cold attic on a crust of bread, but it is equally 
true that the world would hardly deem it wise to set these men up as 
teachers for our undergraduates. On the other hand the fact that a man 
is over-paid or even adequately paid does not assure us that he is the right 
man necessarily for his position. I sincerely hope that when Tech makes 
the appreciable changes in her salaries (which she eventually must), she 
will do so not merely because bread has gone up ten cents a loaf or rent 
fifty dollars a month, but also and more so because the men whom she 
advances will have the qualities Avhich every real teacher must have before 
he can be an inspiration for his students and a credit to his institution. 
I hope the day is not far distant when salary and ability and character 
will all be synonymous, and I trust soon to see the complete passing of the 
times when the earnest and honest members of om- teaching-staffs received 
salaries that were little more than insults while the puffed-up figureheads 
of our faculties raked in their little fortunes. 



43 

I am enclosing a circular to reveal that the oft-referred-to salary- 
increase made recently at Yale (the pioneer university in this matter) 
IS not a thing apart but is coupled with an advance in both the standard 
of teaching and the character of the teacher — the big element in Yale's 
Eeconstruction which so few persons emphasize and which so many ignore. 
I feel that I have done my bit in bringing this about, and 1 ardently hope 
it will be. the big element adopted by other institutions in the adjustment 
of the payroll. 

In conclusion let me repeat that I have written in a manner that is 
entirely impersonal. I desire that -you interpret this letter neither as a 
means for focusing light upon myself nor as a means for placing any 
particular colleague in shadow but as an expression of justice — the only 
thing for which I ever have worked and the only thing for which I ever 
will work and the only thing that is ever worth working for. 
Yours very faithfully, 

George F. Gundelfinger. 

President Hamerschlag never acknowledged the receipt of this letter, 
although 1 learned very much later (May 10th, 1922), from him personally 
and at my own request, that he had shown it to other members of his 
administration. Whether this letter played a part in promoting me, two 
months later, from the rank of instructor to that of assistant professor 
will be left to the reader's imagination. To my mind it is a far more 
daring letter than the one which brought about my dismissal. The emphasis 
I placed on its "impersonal" nature probably swerved President Hamer- 
schlag from wearing a shoe which (in the light of more recent develop- 
ments) would have fit him perfectly, he preferring to leave it for those 
who had so urgently expressed theii- need of footgear. I must admit, 
however, that if this letter did place President Hamerschlag himself in 
shadow I was unaware of it at the time — just as I was unconscious of the 
shadow of the forth-coming duty cast at the very end of the letter. 

The circular referred to in the above letter had also been forwarded 
to the Trustees. 

But the adjustment -bonus was not the only outcome of the Eesolutions, 
although it was, in many cases, practically the only salary increase ever 
made. A year later, January 1921, an educational commission was sent 
by the Carnegie Corporation to study "the financial crisis which affected 
the institute as a whole but which was particularly acute in the operation 
of the Institute of Technology." The result was that in June 1921 an out- 
right appropriation of more than nine million dollars was granted. Just 
a week preceding this announcement I had received my first contract as 
assistant professor for 1921-22, and the increase in salary was only half 
of what it had been the year before, and (if I had not been dismissed) 
there would (I was told) have been no increase at all for the year 1922-23. 
And I believe this action was typical of many cases. In other words, the 
spirited faculty meetings of 1919 helped to bring about a large new endow- 
ment but did little to increase the salaries of teachers as originally intended. 
I, however, had profited by them, though not in a material way. 

Nevertheless it was during those days that the Faculty of the Carnegie 
Institute of Technology appeared to have been reborn and became an 
organization with a constitution and by-laws — a body which thereafter 
had a means of voicing its wants and opinions — a body which could come 



44 

to the rescue of any individual member over whom the autocrat was 
secretly and unjustly exercising his power. The resolutions of 1919 and 
the threatened "strike" which led up to them gave the institute consider- 
able publicity — not of a very helpful kind however. 

Since then the faculty has had numerous sessions devoted to lengthy 
debates over questions of lesser import, resulting in resolutions which will 
scarcely bring the institute much prominence if any, the most pretentious 
one being to the effect that the instruction should also aim at the develop- 
ment of character and culture rather than mere training for a job. 

But there came a supreme opportunity in June 1922 for the Faculty 
of the Carnegie Institute of Technology to bring and to keep the school 
in the public eye in a way that would have been highly beneficial. The 
autocrat was secretly planning to dismiss one of the vei-y members of the 
faculty's own executive committee for his very attempt to encourage the 
development of character and culture among the students (and among the 
faculty, too, for that matter). Although the last scheduled faculty meeting 
of the year was over, the secret was made known in good time to call a 
special session. Indeed a special session was called not through the 
initiative of the faculty however, but indirectly by the autocrat himself. 
With this exceptional chance to go on record as a genuinely democratic 
organization, what did the listless faculty do? Without a single remaining 
spark of its old war-time spii'it, it played into the very hand of the autocrat, 
giving him a final victory with which to descend most gratefully the steps 
of the throne doAvn which he should have been sent headforemost. 

There is one more letter I should like to publish in this chapter: 

March 11th, 1920. 
Dear Colonel Day: 

If I recall rightly, one of the points you emphasized during our 
little (?) chat after luncheon this afternoon was that smoking enabled 
men to break down the barriers of reserve and restraint, to develop 
sociability, to converse freely, to become better acquainted and to ex- 
perience more fully the intimacy of brotherly love. There is a feeling 
■ on my part (and I believe also on yours) that we understand each other 
a w^hole lot better than we have understood each other heretofore — that 
we have mutually experienced all of these little features of friendship 
which I have enumerated above. But what I wish to emphasize in 
writing to you is that we have experienced them without any smoking 
whatever on my part and with very little on yours. In fact, as our 
conversation went on, I observed that your pipe went out, and what you 
held in your hand might just as well have been a newspaper or a pair 
of spectacles. I also noticed that after I left you with Director Mott, 
there were four men still seated at a table in the upper end of the ' ' bean- 
ery" who were still jabbering and blowing smoke into one another's 
faces. I have no idea what these men were talking about, but I wager 
their conversation lacked the warmth and the depth and the intimacy 
which were characteristic of ours. It strikes me as downright silly to 
believe that two men must depend on tobacco to establish a friendly 
relation between them. I feel verj^ sorry for anyone who honestly 
believes that the cloud of smoke which reached from your mouth to my 
nose served to link us together and enable the conduction of thought 



45 

from my mind to yours. It is queer that this flabby idea has taken so 
firm a hold of so many big minds — some of the biggest in the literary 
world; but I feel more sanguine when I recall that in the dark ages the 
biggest minds likewise claimed that the earth was flat. Perhaps the 
present age will also be looked back upon as dark in comparison with 
the age which is yet to come and which is not so very far away. It is 
my ardent wish that our educators in particular will soon tear aside the 
illusions of today and look with a clear and steady eye into the future. 
Otherwise education must rightly be looked upon as passe and something 
else must come to replace it if we really care to progress. If you are 
truly in earnest when you say that a man must have some vices before 
you can love him, I think you will sooner or later come to the conclusion 
that you ought to change either your views or your position as an educa- 
tor of the American youth. 

Yours very faithfully, 

George P. GuNDELriNGEB. 

Director Day had received one of the 2,000 anti-tobacco pamphlets 
I had circulated in March, 1919 (without asking President Hamerschlag's 
permission to do so), and, as the date on this letter indicates, we were 
talking the matter over a whole year later. I had another short talk 
with him in his office about this letter itself a few days after he had 
received it. At that time he seemed a little harassed over my indirect 
reference to his nationality by my use of the word American in con- 
nection with the word youth, but, otherwise, he took the letter in the 
right spirit and, at the same meeting in which we discussed it, he in- 
formed me that I had been appointed assistant professor. 

This promotion to assistant professorship shortly after I had sent 
those two seemingly daring letters — one to the president of the institute 
and one to the head of the particular faculty of which I was a member — 
indicated, I thought, broadmindedness on the parts of these two men 
which compensated somewhat for their faults. No one had seen either 
of these two letters before I mailed them; in fact, no one knew I had 
written them. The president had admitted showing his to other admin- 
istrators at the same meeting (May 10th, 1922) at which Director Day 
also admitted that he had always regarded his as personal. Confidential 
letters of this sort offer an excellent means for men to become acquainted 
with each other, and the letters serve to record things which are only too 
soon forgotten when conveyed through conversation. And no harm can 
come of these letters, however plain, unless their private nature is 
sacrificed and they become a subject of public gossip. I had no desire 
whatever to make these letters public, but I am doing so now to show 
how President Hamerschlag might have acted for Tech's welfare had 
he considered my Poverty-Day letter in the same light in which these 
two were considered. Truth is truth and it should be swallowed as such, 
irrespective of whether the president serves it to the instructor or the 
instructor to the president. 

Still anxious to have smoking limited if not prohibited actually as 
well as nominally at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and realizing 
that the effects of the first distribution (1919) of my pamphlet were 
wearing off, I proposed to circulate copies of the new edition among the 
members of the Freshman class entering in the Pall of 1921. My pro- 



46 

motion to assistant professor made me feel far less free than I felt before, 
so instead of writing a letter (which I might not have sent) I actually 
called at Director Day's office to obtain the permission. The result was 
made known in Part 1 of this booklet. The reader should be informed 
here, however, that while Director Day declined to permit me to circulate 
the new pamphlet among the entire Freshman class at the institute, ho 
said he would not object to my mailing it to my particular friends. How 
liberal! I do not know if he considered the particular freshmen who were 
under my own instruction to be my friends; but I certainly did, and 
their attitude toward President Hamerschlag's action certainly proved 
that my assumption was not false — unless it was the fact that each one 
had received an autographed pamphlet that made them so amicable. 

But I told Director Day that his refusal to let me circulate the 
pamphlet among all freshmen meant that I would take absolutely no 
further interest in Tech's moral reform outside of my own immediate 
classes. And yet shortly after I made that statement, I wrote my 
Poverty-Day letter to the president; and here in this booklet, I am 
broadcasting an extremely severe and direct public criticism of the 
Carnegie Institute of Technology after firmly resolving to myself that 
I would never do so. Am I inconsistent? Am I, after all, "irrational?" 

I could see that Director Day was pleased with my promise to take 
no further general interest in Tech's moral welfare. To me, however, 
his pleasure was a pathetic thing for the school. However, the fact that 
I had told him that I would still be interested in the moral welfare of 
my own particular students, permitted me to write the Poverty-Day 
letter and still remain rational — for more than fifty of my own students 
participated in that parade, and it was more rational on my part to 
write my criticism to the president than to criticise these students in my 
classroom for a thing which the president himself sanctioned. 

So I was certainly rational up to the time I was accused of being 
"irrational." If my action thereafter had resulted solely from an inner 
conflict (which would have been impossible), I would undeniably have 
proved myself irrational; but in the light of the events that followed, 
my action has been essential and infinitely more rational than America's 
part in the Great War, the kind of action, in fact, that is woefully want- 
ing in times of peace to prevent stagnation and degeneracy. 

What if, after the Germans sank the Lusitania, America had simply 
said nothing and allowed the whole thing to blow over? We were told 
that would have been most dishonorable. The analogy may seem largely 
overdrawn to the reader, and yet my dismissal would, had I allowed it 
to pass over, have been a comparatively greater disgrace to educational 
America, a staggering blow to even the most lawful form of academic 
freedom and a complete triumph for academic autocracy. Those who had 
planned to dismiss me knew of my resolve to remain quiet about the 
faults of Carnegie Tech and thought, no doubt, that I would "resign" 
without a word of public criticism against the institute. The plain truth 
is that if I had intended to criticise the school publicly, I would have 
resigned purposely to do so (just as I did at Tale), and I would have 
resigned before the president had had a chance to dismiss me. But I 
made it plain to the president in my Poverty-Day letter that I had no 
intention of criticising Carnegie Tech publicly, and I emphasized the 
fact again in my printed Letter to the Trustees, the Faculty and the 



47 

Students. It is true that I wanted Tech criticised publicly, but I wanted 
one of her own alumni to do it. I myself wanted to stay at the institute 
in spite of her faults, trusting they would eventually be rectified by 
other agents; and I wanted to conform to every honorable restriction 
requisite to my staying and to live up to my resolve not to criticise her 
publicly. And I did so until I was dismissed. But I refused to go in the 
silence indicative of shame. My printed Letter was the most honorable 
and effective means for me to inform the school that I did not want to 
go and that I would not go in silence. It is true that I had criticised the 
school directly in that Letter; but the criticism was necessary in my own 
defense. But it was not public criticism. I had restricted the circulation 
of my Letter to the students and officers of the school, and I requested 
those to whom it was sent to do the same. That T still refused to criticise 
publicly was proved by my letter to the Pittsburgh editor; and my letter 
to Acting-President Baker indicated that I had given the school more 
chance than I had promised it to prevent public criticism when the latter 
became honorable on my part in spite of my resolve. My efforts were 
ignored and probably ridiculed as were President Wilson's series of Notes 
to Germany in his attempt to prevent our entry into the World War. 
But there comes a time in the opinions of even the mos-P considerate men, 
when they feel that no further chance should be given to the transgressor, 
when the latter has proved himself hopeless beyond a doubt, when one 
should cease casting pearl opportunities into ears that can never be made 
into silk purses, when the dumb beast itself seems to crave extinction. 
So finally, after receiving the letter from Acting-President Baker, it 
became wondrously clear to me that however ardently I had wanted 
reinstatement, the "school" (irrespective of superficial sympathy and of 
individual or group opinion of a more sincere nature) wanted my dis- 
missal, and then only did I feel that public criticism of the institution, 
in spite of my resolve, was an inevitable duty, not so much for the 
purpose of righting a personal injustice as in defense of Righteousness 
and Principle — for when that moment arrived, my personal desire to 
return to Carnegie Tech was effaced completely. 

Now (September, 1922) I look back upon the whole thing as a 
struggle between the ordinary and the supernatural. My resolve not to 
criticise, my emotion over the cheers of the students, my unwillingness 
to recognize the inaction of the faculty and my desire to become re- 
instated were mere manifestations of the ego. To remain silent, to close 
the eyes and the ears to wrong, to live and labor unthinking in the midst 
of it, to believe men love you for it, to refrain from doing anything that 
might check or even retard personal advancement — these are the com- 
mandments of the average being; and all of them must be broken by 
the exceptional man who, though you call him "inhuman," is here to 
work unselfishly the revolutions which make for humanity's progress — ■ 
the work for which he is destined. 

The Element of Destiny was showing the way at a very early date 
when I was totally unconscious of it; but I have written this chapter to 
reveal that element as it now appears to me. As far back as 1906 the 
Carnegie Institute of Technology (then known as the Carnegie Technical 
Schools) was reaching out for the very services I am now performing 
for the Spirit of Progress, although I had not yet had the experience of 
reforming my Alma Mater — not even the forethought of that experience. 



And even after I had acquired that experience, I did not realize in the 
slightest degree that I was entering Carnegie Tech with the eventual 
purpose of criticising her also. However, the fact that Tech officials 
knew of mj critical nature and took me on trial in the Night School 
indicated a subconscious fear on their part. It is true that I felt an 
immediate repulsion for President Hamerschlag the first time I met him; 
but that, though necessary, was not sufficient to indicate that the entire 
school was at fault; and further contact with Mm could easily have been 
and was (until the very end) reduced to an insignificant minimum. The 
Element of Destiny again appeared when Tech called for my services at 
a time when I was about to be drafted into actual military service which 
might have proved fatal and from which she herself seemed to exempt me 
solely for the future purpose of disclosing her faults. My play The Great 
Believer should also be mentioned in this connection. If Mr. Belasco had 
accepted it, I would not have written to President Hamerschlag. I had 
finished the manuscript only shortly before my interview with the latter, 
who, strangely enough, spoke of chorus girls, play-writing, Americanism 
— the play itself dealing with exemption from military service for the 
purpose of fightieg the immorality of the theatre. It was not entirely 
clear to me why I, several years later, sent a copy of this play to Mrs. 
Hamerschlag with my answer to her letter, although I have stated else- 
where the excuse which Destiny invented to conceal her game. I even 
regretted having sent that play after I had dropped it into the mailbox; 
I regretted, in particular, having written Mrs. Hamerschlag 's own words 
on the fly-leaf — her false propliecy-»-the part of her condemnatory letter 
which has proved the finest point of all. I did a number of things then 
not knowing exactly why I was doing them. It seemed I was being 
guided by a force other than personal conscience. Nevertheless I acted 
with abandon and yet with a sense of protection. Likewise, on the other 
side, I doubt now if it was the hand of feminine curiosity that opened 
my Poverty-Day letter; it was the Hand of Destiny — the same hand 
that addressed that letter to the president's home instead of to his office. 
Whether the public cares to believe me or not, I am willing to swear 
that none of this was premeditated on my part. I never even dreamed 
tliat my Poverty-Day letter to the president would result in my dismissal 
— all the less so because similar letters (published in this chapter) had 
the very opposite effect; at least it appeared so then. But it occurs to 
me now that my advancement to assistant professor may have been 
merely a means for checking my liberties and precluding further agita-. 
tion — a tendency which it did have. (I recall that Director Day said 
my advance in title would involve no additional responsibilities.) I should 
not be surprised if President Hamerschlag resurrected my Salary-Ques- 
tion letter in June, 1922, and used it to intensify the agitation of the 
Heads who wrote the Eecommendation for him. For President Hamer- 
schlag himself was none the less a puppet with Destiny pulling on the 
strings. Perhaps I was all wrong to accuse him of being vindictive. After 
all, was not my dismissal jarerequisite to his "resignation?" Without 
his determination to dismiss me, there would have been no printed 
Letter. The printed Letter revealed more than was necessary to save 
me and therefore defeated its own purpose. But was my salvation the 
object of the printed Letter? Evidently not; the object of the printed 
Letter (as I now see it) was the crystallization and publication of 



49 

those additional facts which led up to the president's "resignation." 
The printed Letter also brought the "newspaper reporter" and his visit 
led me to have my story ready to send subconsciously (via telepathy) 
to the meeting of the trustees (although I believed all the while I was 
preparing it for actual reproduction in the Paper.) The whole school, 
of which the "reporter" was a part, was acting according to Destiny's 
dictation to bring about the president's "resignation." 

But why then did not Destiny dictate to the school to reinstate me 
after the president's removal? Because Destiny has another object in 
view — an object which I shall soon predict. 

Though unconscious of the final part I was destined to play and of 
all the threads which were leading up to it, I was, as stated earlier, aware 
of the faults of Carnegie Tech and of many of her officers. I could not 
help observing these against my will, and much that I did not see directly 
was being poured into my ears constantly by others. While these persons 
were sources of information, they were by no means sources of inflammation, 
however ardently they craved to incite me to publish facts to quench their 
own thirst for personal' revenge — a contagious disease which I had not 
contracted even though the Resolutions of the General Faculty claimed 
that the "direct charges and covert insinuations" against Director Day 
and Professor Keller in my printed Letter were ' ' vindictive in spirit. ' ' 
The earlier letters, published in this chapter and written long before my 
dismissal was contemplated, clearly show that my charges are not manifesta- 
tions of personal revenge due to dismissal; my printed Letter was merely 
a repetition of these charges for the enlightenment of the school as a 
whole. It is a pleasure for me to knoAv that both President Hamerschlag 
and Director Day knew this fact, and I am glad that all the members of 
the faculty may know it now. Let the reader turn back to my letter to 
Director Day (March 11th, 1920) and read again the last sentence and 
then decide for himself if the charge in it differs much if any from my 
charge in the printed Letter to the Trustees, the Faculty and the Students 
(May 27th, 1922) ; and let him re-read my letter to President Hamerschlag 
(February 7th, 1920), in which I allude to the "figureheads of our 
faculties who rake in their little fortunes," and then decide if this "covert 
insinuation" concerning Professor Keller is not identical with my "dii'ect 
charge" against him in my open Letter. I claim that there was absolutely 
nothing "vindictive in spirit" about my printed Letter, just as there was 
nothing about my first printed attack on Yale to indicate that I myself 
was disgruntled. I believe that any intelligent member of the General 
Faculty who voted for those Eesolutions will (now that he has cooled off 
and become just as well-informed as the "Heads") realize his mistake. 
And, after all, what reason had I to be revengeful toward Carnegie Tech 
or any of her officers? Had any one of those whom I attacked ever done 
me a real harm? Had they not, on the other hand, seemingly helped me 
in many, many ways? Was I going to consider even my dismissal an insult 
or a reality until I had first painted the jury as they are and then learned 
the attitude of the school on the matter? 

But after I discovered how the conspirators had all assembled to word 
the Eecommendation for my "extinction," it would be a folly to deny 
that I entertained the delight to ' ' come back at them. ' ' When one 's personal 
enemies stoop so "viciously low" as to recommend poison gas but are too 
refined and timid to use it'unexpurgated and must force their subordinates 



50 

to discharge it in diluted form, it is only right and kind to show them the 
proper and effective use which can be made of poison gas of finer quality 
100 per cent pxire. 

But my mere delight in fighting a personal injustice or injury could 
never assume the magnitude of the passion which inflamed me to write 
and publish this booklet; and yet the personal element is never completely 
lacking in a truly great fighter. While he does not go to battle merely 
to avenge a personal wrong, he can not fight with body, heart and soul 
unless injury has been done to or contemplated for some thing which is 
more dear to him than reputation and life — a cause, maybe, to which he 
himself has devoted body, heart and soul. When one knows exactly what 
one is fighting against, when one believes it to be wrong, believes it so 
relentlessly that he needs not another mind to strengthen his belief, not a 
single ally or under-dog to share the brunt of battle in which failure must 
be impossible, then a personal triviality such as injury to reputation or 
physique and even death are entirely disregarded in a mercUess encounter. 
During the war no one pitied more than I that type of American soldier 
who was forced to fight blindly, whose own conscience was shattered and 
often replaced by the lying conscience of one immune from physical danger 
and who innocently had to die or suffer permanent injury; but I have no 
compassion — not even in times of peace — on the guilty hypocrites who are 
rightly made to suffer permanent disgrace, and I myself suffer no com- 
punction either by exposing them in their effort to crush my cause or in 
crushing them with the powerful resistance inspired by my discovery. 

There were those who, in spite of their unwillingness to agree with 
my views, had become friendly with me on account of other personal 
qualities and because of their hidden admiration for those ideals which all 
men, though slaves to habit, custom and tradition, know in their hearts to 
be great. Personally, however, I am but a symbol for the ideals I defend, 
and 1 cannot sincerely reciprocate — not even gladly accept — the friendship 
of a man who, however much he may have become attached to me, does 
not, as the same time respect and uphold these ideals. Furthermore, when 
the impersonal fight for these ideals comes to a crisis, I must forget any 
favors these friends have done for me and class them among the enemies 
to my cause. 

The fact that I had enclosed circulars concerning my work of reform 
with each copy of my printed Letter assured me that each reader of the 
Letter knew of mj- activities outside of the institute — activities with which 
he was not, perhaps, entirely in sympathy if at all. Just as a stained cross- 
section more clearly reveals the structure under the microscope, so the 
dismissal of my ideals (symbolized by my own dismissal), not because it was 
wanted by the president only bat because it was sanctioned by the school 
as a whole, had become the stain on the character of the Carnegie Institute 
of Technology which served to show me more deeply the sores I could not 
refrain from observing superficially with my naked eye, but on which I 
earlier had neither the desire nor the intention to use the lens now demanded 
by Destiny. All the little human microbes, whether personal friends or 
personal enemies or just plain microbes, whose favors I had accepted and 
whose activities, more or less secret, had earlier amused me when I chanced 
to observe them or hear of them, now appeared enlarged and engaged in a 
concerted effort to crush the ideals that meant death to their own egotistic 
interests. All the good work I had accomplished for Yale — her new begin- 



51 

nings symbolized by the Harkness Memorial Tower, like The New 
Fraternity, rising majestically into the clear blue sky, her chimes heralding 
fulfillment across the American Continent- — all the good done by the hun- 
dreds of thousands of books, pamphlets and circulars about Yale which I 
had mailed to officers, teachers and students at schools and colleges reaching 
from coast to coast — all this good the microbes wanted to undo, feeling 
that my dismissal from their own immediate breeding-ground was symbolic 
of my general banishment from the field of American education, leaving 
it unresistingly receptive for the seeds of their own selfish indulgences and 
base schemes which would be scattered by the report of their personal 
victory. 

For, I repeat it, the only victory these "men" and their allies were 
striving to win was a personal victory. Although the causes I have fought 
for (without allies) have always triumphed and will continue to triumph, 
nevertheless my past experiences show that I personally am invariably hated 
as a result of it. But I have learned to endure the vinegar — even to relish 
it — for its very bitterness is needed to make the impersonal triumph of 
Eighteousness the sweeter by contrast; and it is the intensification of that 
sense of a purely unselfish victory which incites me to rise again after each 
temporary personal defeat — to rise and to answer "present" and "ready" 
to the call, and to press on as before. 

For I shall continue my writings and propaganda for morality among 
American college students at the same time completing the series of 
Mathematical text books which I have well under way. It is doubtful, 
however, if I shall ever again become officially connected with any one 
particular college or university, because we are too far from the millenium 
to expect the "irrational" and "viciously low" author of a booklet so 
truthful as the likes of this one to be brought knowingly in direct contact 
with our undergraduates, however much they may be in need of and are 
benefited by his absent treatments. 

But if I should happen to be sought semi-secretly by some brave 
educational institution, "wonderful Math teacher" or not, I shall refuse 
in advance merely to train students for a job by teaching them that two 
and two are four "irrespective of where and how they spend their nights." 
Nor will I feel assured that their nights are being passed advantageously 
simply because I have been appointed to serve on a religious committee of 
the faculty consisting of so many cigarette-sucking hypocrites. Not only 
the members of such a committee but the president of the institution as 
well as the teachers must be forcibly moral men who will serve as examples 
to the students. This is the first requisite necessary to reduce the effort of 
moral instruction to a minimum; for the effort of moral instruction must 
be reduced to a minimum in order to be effective. The last thing I would 
sanction would be the transformation of the college recitation into a 
direct Sunday School Class. Furnish the student with forcibly moral 
instructors and the moral instruction in the classroom will then be both 
given out and absorbed unconsciously; it will become so thoroughly mixed 
with cultural and technical knowledge that one will be unable to detect 
its flavor, although even those to whom its separate flavor is repulsive will 
be benefited by digesting it unknowingly. All moral enlightenment received 
directly and consciously must be received individually outside of the class- 
room; it will be one of the ways in which the students will spend their 
nights to advantage — by reading plain pamphlets and beneficial books 



52 

whose distribution will not be prohibited because the faculty are in greater 
need of them, but encoaraged, particularly by the students themselves in 
their desire to emulate the conduct of their instructors. 

To say that all effort toward reform is futile is but to admit one's own 
indifference or to confess one's own immorality and submission to habit 
and custom and to give the impression that one is incurable, which is true 
in some but not in all instances. In the majority of cases there is, fortune- 
ately, infinite hope — a foundation which, in itself, is not weak and diseased 
but merely contaminated superficially from its vulgar contact with the 
common stream of life. In time this contamination may smk in so deeply 
that inner purification seems impossible — and yet if we were pure at 
birth, it is always a promise that we may again become so with infinite 
pains. 

In my book Ten Years at Yale, written almost ten years ago, I said: 
"Yale has many superficial frocks and frills, but there is an iron constitu- 
tion beneath them and not a wax body which melts under the heat of 
criticism." My criticism has torn off those frocks and frills and exposed 
that iron constitution to the rain and the sun and the wind which have 
cured it of many concealed blemishes, others gradually vanishing; and 
today that wholesomely productive constitution stands naked, erect and 
clean, for universal inspection, singing its everlasting gratitude for 
salvation from j)ast sins and chiming its voluntary precaution against 
future degeneracy. 

But there is no iron constitution to the other educational institution 
with which I have been associated. She has sores that reach down to her 
very marrow. They are not sores that were at one time superficial and 
which have deepened with age from inattention — for she is too young. 
They are innate sores. I can think of her only as the child of her first 
president, who must ever be known as the father of the school which was 
prenatally infected with his own ' ' ideals. ' ' In addition to inheriting these 
defects, her mental attitude is such as to render them doubly incurable; 
for she still reveres her departed parent, is i^roud of her oAvn condition 
and scornfully dismisses the reformer who might have tried, though in 
vain, to heal her. Such an offspring may continue to live for some time; 
but is not her mere existence a source of contamination to other schools? 
The Carnegie Institute of Technology is without a future. As long 
as she goes by that name or even if she changes her name to become a 
"new" school, she will sink lower and lower in the estimation of the 
general public. Neither upright students nor inspiring teachers will enter 
her gates tomorrow; they will avoid her as an outcast deteriorating with 
contagion — as a condemned thing about to collapse. Those lovers of purity 
and truth who are today still teaching and being taught within her walls 
will ultimately realize their lack of Avisdom and gradually forsake her; 
and those who enter to replace them will be low creatures whose "love" 
for each other and whose "loyalty" for their Alma Mater can flourish 
only on their and her vices. And tlius will she hasten her death by taking 
in additional poison to sustain her life. 

THE END 



Andrew Carnegie and Pittsburgh. 

My readers Avill claim, that though my personal attacks may be 
justifiable, I am wrong to attack the school which bears the name of our 
most illustrious " Pittsburgher " — Andrew Carnegie. If Andrew Carnegie 
were living today, I would certainly have gone to him as the last person to 
reinstate ideals (by reinstating myself) at his schools, thereby preventing 
the publication of this booklet ; I would even resist destiny and try to 
hear him still, through Oliver Lodge as a medium, were it not that Mr. 
Carnegie did not believe any too strongly in a life beyond the grave. 

That I did appeal to Mr. Carnegie before I had any forethought of 
destiny — in fact before I was connected with his schools — is recorded in 
the following letter: 

ANDREW CAENEGIE 
' 2 East 91st Street 
New York 

February 23rd, 1917. 
Dear Sir: 

Mr. Carnegie desires me to thank you for your kind favor of twenty- 
first February with copy of your book "The New Fraternity" which he 
hopes to look into at an early date. 

Yours very truly, 

J. A. PoTNTON, Secretary. 

Whether Mr. Carnegie found time to "look into" my book I do not 
at present know and shall probably never learn; but I have discovered 
that he favored strongly the ideals which the book upholds. And this 
knowledge, coming as it did without any inquiry on my part and without 
any reference to me personally, will be regarded all the more impartial 
and, being recorded by his own hand^ will be considered far more authen- 
tic than if it had come to us through Sir Oliver. 

Mr. Carnegie's AutoTiiograpliy was published in 1920. I did not read 
it until after my dismissal from the Carnegie Institute of Technology 
— in fact, not until I began the writing of Part V of this booklet; and 
the reading did not throw one iota of discouragement in the way of the 
thoughts I was then putting on paper. 

Mr. Carnegie never attended college, but the following facts con- 
cerning his life at the age when boys do are very welcome in this par- 
ticular connection: 

"I had just reached my eighteenth birthday, and I do not see how 
it could be possible for any boy to arrive at that age much freer from 
a knowledge of anything but what was good and pure. I do not believe, 
up to that time, I had ever spoken a bad word in my life and seldom 
heard one. I knew nothing of the base and the vile. Fortunately I had 
always been brought in contact with good people. 

"I was now plunged at once into the company of coarse men, for 
the office was temporarily only a portion of the shops and the head- 
quarters for the freight conductors, brakemen and firemen. All of them 



54 

had access to the same room with Superintendent Scott and myself, and 
they availed themselves of it. This was a different world, indeed, from 
that to which I had been accustomed. I was not happy about it. I ate, 
necessarily, of the tree of knowledge of good and evil for the first time. 
But there was still the sweet and pure surroundings of home, where 
nothing coarse or wicked ever entered, and besides, there was the world 
in which I dwelt with my companions, all of them refined young men, 
striving to improve themselves and become respected citizens. I passed 
through this phase of my life detesting what was foreign to my nature 
and my early education. The experience with coarse men was probably 
beneficial because it gave me a "scunner" (disgust), to use a Scotism, 
at chewing or smoking tobacco, also at swearing or the use of improper 
language, which fortunately remained with me through life." 

At that time Mr. Carnegie did not know there was going to be a 
school named after him — a school which in part was a duplication of "a 
portion of the shops and the headquarters for the freight conductors, 
brakemen and firemen." But even though some believe that the atmos- 
phere of a technical school needs the "coarse and wicked" element to 
make it as real and practical as the actual shop, I believe Mr. Carnegie 
would have wanted the students to have benefited (as he had) from "the 
experience with coarse men" rather than to have been influenced — even 
encouraged — in habits which unfortunately remain with them through life. 

I should like to reprint here a few statements concerning Mr. Car- 
negie's childhood: 

"My uncle, like all my family, was a moral-force man and strong 
for obedience to law, but radical to the core and an intense admirer of 
the American Eepublic. 

' ' Dunfermline has long been renowned as perhaps the most radical 
town in the Kingdom. 

"As a child I could have slain king, duke or lord, and considered 
their deaths a service to the state and hence an heroic act." 

These statements show that Mr. Carnegie was influenced both by 
heredity and environment to become a moral radical. That his own 
moral fibre remained^ intact throughout his life is evident; but his desire 
to slay heroically the external forces which were undermining others, 
cooled when he came to America and contracted instead the fever for 
capital. That he was conscious of this appears in his own words: "To 
continue much longer, overwhelmed by business cares and with most of 
my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest 
time, must degrade me beyond hope of recovery." Making fortunes and 
fighting the world's immorality do not seem to go hand-in -hand. "The 
men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck 
to it," he says. Mr. Carnegie succeeded in making millions, with which 
he helped to reward heroes — in particular, those with moral courage, 
hoping to see the passing of those with mere physical courage through 
his ten-million-dollar endowment for "the abolition of international war, 
the foulest blot upon our civilization." But Mir. Carnegie himself can 
hardly be classed with the world's moral heroes. His willingness in 
childhood to ' ' have slain king, duke or lord ' ' was not even metamor- 



55 

phosed into a desire to slay nicotine, alcohol or prostitution; in fact his 
earlier willingness to slay was itself completely slain by his desire for 
millions and peace. 

It is true that he has given us libraries galore which he could not 
have done without his money, and it is true that these libraries contain 
innumerable books to guide youth along righteous paths (as well as 
books to amuse the beautifiil and the damned on this side of paradise). 
But it is clear that we need something more than libraries filled with 
books; we need schools to guide youth in his reading and his actions. 
It was a step in the right direction to erect a group of schools very close 
to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; but schools likewise are of little 
benefit — in fact detrimental — if they are not supervised judiciously and 
taught by inspiring teachers. "Of all professions, that of teaching," 
he says, "is probably the most unfairly, yes, most meanly paid, though 
it should rank with the highest." And yet Mr. Carnegie did nothing to 
raise the salaries of teachers even at his own schools, which are still far 
below the highest paid -elsewhere; he preferred to give twenty-five mil- 
lions to the Carnegie Institution of Washington for new investigations 
and discoveries, instead of using it to raise the salaries of those who 
were imparting to youth the firmly established knowledge which has 
stood the test of ages. (One must, however, admire him for divorcing 
research from teaching and placing it in an institution of its own.) His 
pensions for teachers are praiseworthy in so far as they are a blessing to 
those who are no longer able to teach, but it seems to me that if these 
sums were used earlier as salary increases they would in addition be a 
blessing to the students by making the teachers more independent and 
hence more efficient during their active days. It lay in Mr. Carnegie's 
power to make the Carnegie Institute of Technology one of the bigger 
and more independent intellectual and moral forces in the country instead 
of the disgrace to his name that it now undeniably is. Even in his will. 
where he remembered other worthy educational institutions so generously, 
he gave no direct gift to the one named after him, leaving it at the mercy 
of the Carnegie Corporation of New York to which he gave one hundred 
and twenty-five of his millions in 1911 and twenty more by his will in 
1919, to say nothing of further sums that may come to it as his residuary 
legatee — all of which is to aid technical schools and institutions of higher 
learning throughout the United States rather than those alone which 
bear his name. 

The puzzle to be solved is: Why did Andrew Carnegie spread his 
fortune out over so many institutions of learning instead of concentrating 
it on the one which bears his name? Was he, after all, seeking nation- 
vidde publicity and worship instead of the establishment of a great 
university which would attract students not only from all parts of the 
country but also from all parts of the world? I think not; I think he 
wanted to help all smaller colleges and accomplish the latter project 
as well. 

But I think he foresaw the failure of the latter project if the Car- 
negie Institute of Technology was to be its beginning. I think he secretly 
realized that the wrong man had been chosen to guide it, observing that 
it had been polluted from birth in a way that could never be cleansed 
even through unlimited endowment. That Mr. Carnegie's estimate of 
the genius of men has sometimes been wrong may be gathered by reading 



56 

the last chapter of his Autohiography. The following paragraph from an 
earlier chapter is also noteworthy in this connection: 

"He is the happy man who feels that there is not a human being 
to whom he does not wish happiness, long life and deserved success, not 
one in whose path he would cast an obstacle nor to whom he would not 
do a service if in his power. All this he can feel without being called 
upon to retain as friend one who has proved unworthy beyond question 
by dishonorable conduct. For such there should be nothing felt but pity, 
infinite pity. And pity for your own loss also, for true friendship can 
only feed and grow upon the virtues." 

In addition to all this, may not the location of the schools have 
influenced him in preventing their growth? Did he, after all, wish to 
see the schools which bear his own name predominate over the university 
which bears the name of his beloved American city — -the university which 
had been founded for over a century before his schools were inaugurated 
to usurp its privileges? If he did, he would not have remembered that 
particular university in his final will and testament. His gift to "Pitt" 
and his seeming disconcern for ' ' Tech, ' ' announced after his death, 
indirectly record the desire and vision of his last days on earth — the 
desire that the university should and the vision that it would finally 
absorb the technical schools, the latter coming eventually from the 
Carnegie Corporation of New York as the real gift of which the intro- 
ductory amount bequeathed in his will was merely a promise. To have 
helped the University of Pittsburgh so abundantly would be reward 
enough in itself, without having his name floating over her. Was he not 
entirely satisfied with the memorial which had already been erected to his 
name before his schools were built to mar it? For he wrote at a time 
when the schools were well established and without including them: 
"The success of Library, Art Gallery, Museum and Music Hall — a noble 
quartet in an immense building — is one of the chief satisfactions of my 
life. This is my monument, because here I lived my early life and made 
my start, and I am to-day in heart a devoted son of dear old smoky 
Pittsburgh." 

As far back as 1915, Professor C. E. Mann made a comparative study 
of the University of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, 
pointing out the unnecessary and wasteful duplication of courses. At the 
time, no changes were made; but of late considerable co-ordination and 
interchange of teachers has been effected. The acquisition of the ground 
facing Carnegie Institute by the University of Pittsburgh likewise 
brings the university in material contact with the technical schools, Mr. 
Carnegie's "monument" serving as the connecting link between them. 
There are several trustees common to the Boards of both institutions, 
Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, being 
one of them who has made gifts to both schools. With the resignation of 
Tech's first president accomplished and with personal ambition and 
further competition largely eliminated, it would seem that the Greatek 
University of Pittsburgh is now but a matter of time, and Mr. Carnegie's 
favorite American city will, according to the Mann Eeport, "soon become 
a center of educational investigation and enlightenment second to none 
in this country." 

THE BEGINNING 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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Ten Years at Yale 

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The Passing op Brother Greek 

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My Dismissal From 
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